jjs105/devcontainers

Home for both development and management of personal development container templates and features.

Development Environment

The repository itself uses a tweaked version of the Node.js based development container provided as a starter template for container development. This container provides the following features:

• Use of Docker in Docker
• Installation of the official development container CLI tool(s)
• VS Code support for bash scripting (via extension)
• Installation of ESLint in VS Code (via extension)

Repository Structure

The repository is split into two main areas. The first containing the source code for the development container templates and the second the source code for individual development container features.

In addition the repository contains a scripts directory containing support scripts and tools used to develop the development templates and features.

Implementation

The templates and features in this repository have been initially implemented as an exercise to learn about development containers and features.

Templates

Features

The two main approaches to feature implementation seem to be either a) as a single self-contained install script, or b) by utilising the approach used by many of the official, or community supported, development container features, as follows:

• Use of a common library_scripts.sh code library, for which there seems to be no master location

• Use of the nanolayer CLI tool to keep container image layers as small as possible when installing packages etc.

• Use of the gh-release feature to install the latest release of the Exercism CLI directly from the GitHub repository

• The above use of nanolayer and/or gh-release also require python to be installed and available on the container

Approach

The implementations in this repository utilise ideas from all of the above approaches with the additional following aims:

• The feature should be fully stand-alone
• Container image layers should be kept as small as possible using best practice
• Centralise common functions in a library file that can be re-used at a later date

Build Tools etc.

Build tools contained in this repository are implemented either a) directly as yarn scripts or b) in the scripts/bin directory. In the latter case the commands are also available as yarn scripts.

Use of 'master' Scripts and Libraries

This repository utilises a build tool script which allows master versions of certain reused files to be copied into the appropriate locations before build.

The master files and where they are copied to are listed below:

• tools.sh cp-lib

  • scripts/lib/devcontainers-lib.sh -> /templates/src/**/
  • scripts/lib/devcontainers-lib.sh -> /features/src/**/

• tools.sh cp-test

  • scripts/lib/test.sh -> /templates/test/**/
  • scripts/lib/test.sh -> /features/test/**/