Please create a CLI and spec for .devcontainer use outside of VSCode

[Taytay]

(I couldn't find anything related to this in the issues list, but there likely is one.)

Short version: This project is attempting to do what I'm hoping Microsoft will make officially supported:
https://github.com/stuartleeks/devcontainer-cli

Longer version: I love the .devcontainer approach, and want to see it adopted and standardized everywhere. I am adding it to a popular open source project right now. My only hesitation is the notion that it requires VSCode. I'd love to be able to offer everyone a fallback of a CLI tool that allows for the common use cases from the command line:
Starting/stopping container
Dropping into the container
Running a command
etc...

For this to happen, the .devcontainer needs to be a separate spec defined and captured outside of a VSCode extension. Is that on the roadmap? Perhaps that's very publicly described as a goal somewhere, and I just missed it?

[chrmarti]

Tracked as #4684.

[jan-hudec]

@chrmarti, the requests seem very different. The request #4684 asks for starting vscode with the container opened, while this one asks for starting the container without vscode (UI; though it would be preferable to have just a node library without needing whole installation).

[chrmarti]

Makes sense, reopening to track as separate request.

[Taytay]

Thanks @jan-hudec and thanks @chrmarti for re-opening.
🤞 I'm not alone on this.

[jan-hudec]

I would add that for me the main reason to want this is continuous integration. When I set up a devcontainer for development, I obviously want to use the same container for CI. Being able to just load the parameters from devcontainer.json would be significant help (then we could have plugin for the CI that would read the tasks from .vscode/config.json and run them in the devcontainer for near-effortless CI setup).

[PavelSosin-320]

Plus JSON schema...... if possible.

[baruchiro]

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/devcontainer-cli

[chrmarti]

Thanks @baruchiro for the link. Closing as this is now available.