An Introduction to VS Code Dev Containers

An Introduction to VS Code Dev Containers

What the heck is a VS Code Dev Container?

The Visual Studio Code Dev Containers extension lets you use a container as a full-featured development environment. It allows you to open any folder inside (or mounted into) a container and take advantage of Visual Studio Code’s full feature set. A devcontainer.json file in your project tells VS Code how to access (or create) a development container with a well-defined tool and runtime stack. This container can be used to run an application or to separate tools, libraries, or runtimes needed for working with a codebase.

Full-featured development environment sounds good. In this screencast I give a brief (but not brief enough) introduction to Dev Containers. The second half of the video shows how to launch a dev container for tapadocs.