Development environment as code. Your dev env in a container with seamless X11 support. You get a gnome-terminal from where you can start additional windows and programs.
In the screenshot below the black terminal window runs on the host. In that terminal, the development environment is started. That in turn opens the cream terminal window which lives inside the container. From the cream terminal I start xeyes and eclipse, seamlessly connecting to the X server on the host.
Runs as a podman container (using an Ubuntu Jammy base image) on an Ubuntu Jammy host.
Your ~/.ssh, ~/.aws and ~/Downloads are mounted into the container.
The Podman socket is mounted into the container, so you can interact with the host's podman daemon using the podman client inside the container.
The ~/source directory in the container is mounted to a volume, so your work there will survive stops and starts of
the container.
After having started the dev env once, you can edit ~/.config/devenv/bashrc to define additional lines to add at the
end of the ~/.bashrc inside the container. For example, if you have an IP address in your network that you want to
store in an environment variable, the ~/.config/devenv/bashrc is a good place to put such variables. Avoid putting
secrets in there, the contents will be visible in docker image metadata.
To protect your host, make sure podman runs rootless. Otherwise, if the root user inside the container escapes the container it will have root privileges on your host.
If you need sudo rights inside your development container you can run podman exec -it -u 0 devenv /bin/bash to start
a second session as the root user. Note that this user is only root inside your container, it is mapped to an ephemeral
subordinate UID on your host.
- Linux
- Git (
sudo apt install git) - Podman (
sudo apt install podman)
This has only been tested on an Ubuntu Jammy host.
- Clone this repo:
git clone https://github.com/jonaslind/devenv.git- Start the Development Environment:
./devenvThe first time the development environment starts it'll ask you for your name and email. These are used to set up the
~/.gitconfig file inside the container. You only need to enter this once, your answers are remembered (stored in
~/.local/devenv/ on the host) for the next time.
- When you change laptop you only need to install git and podman, the rest is recreated by the utility.
- You can run several different conflicting environments in parallel.
- Try out changes, new versions of software etc and throw it away if it doesn't work out.
- Version controlled source code of all your settings and installations.
This environment is obviously set up with software and settings that I prefer. There is no ambition to create a development environment that suits everyone. You should have your tools of the trade set up just the way you like it.
However, you can use this repository as a blueprint to modify into whatever setup you prefer.