Limitations
There are several limitations that you need to keep in mind when working with Dev Containers.
Dev Containers on Windows
Dev Container images based on the Windows OS are not supported.
Creating Dev Containers from a VCS project
When you start a Dev Container from a VCS project, the following steps occur under the hood:
Build a Dev Container
Prepare the helper container for
git clone
.Clone into the Docker volume.
Create the
tmp
working directory.Extract the build context from the volume.
Docker gets the context for the Dev Container building.
Clean up a temporary working directory.
To avoid errors in the devcontainer.json
properties, Docker file, and Docker-compose related to a mount process and relative paths, we list all the build steps and include a warning suggesting to check your Dev Container configuration.
Check the following warning example:
Run Container inside the remote IDE
A scenario of creating a Dev Container from the running backend-client connection is not supported.
For example, you connected to your remote project using the SSH connection and you've added a devcontainer.json
. There is no option to start a Dev Container from the created devcontainer.json
file.
However, you can use the following procedure as a workaround:
Create a Dev Container on the remote machine
Create a Docker connection to SSH.
Install the Docker CLI locally.
On Windows, you can install it without the Docker desktop; we don't need the Docker daemon, we need only Docker CLI.
Commit all changes from the SSH machine to Git.
Create a Dev Container by using remote server and the
git clone
command.