Dev Containers with Podman?

[nicktramp]

I'm looking to create and use a dev container with the Theia IDE, but don't quite understand why I'm encountering the issues I am. Are there docs related to using dev containers with Theia that I missed? Or, can the Dev Containers spec be relied upon for use in Theia? I'm seeing a warning of Unable to load schema from vscode://schemas/settings/machine: Canceled (FileSystemError) when a devcontainer.json file is created.

For context: I can use "Dev Container: Reopen in a container" from the command palette and Theia attempts to create the dev container (without having installed an extension) but returns an HTTP 500 - connection refused error. I'm unsure where to find more info about this error to continue investigating; the podman runtime is running and accessible and I've "re-routed" docker commands to podman as in this blog post. Should I not expect the Theia IDE to run dev containers without an extension? Running Thea IDE 1.57.100 on Linux Mint. Any insight is appreciated.

[JonasHelming]

@jonah-iden

[msujew]

Jonah isn't available for a few days, he'll currently traveling.

@nicktramp We're still missing a lot of documentation in that area. Can you share your dev container file? We're actually not supporting the whole spec, and so you might run into an unsupported feature that prevents the image from starting up. See also #14447.

[nicktramp]

Ok, thanks for the info. My devcontainer.json file is as simple as I could make it: { "image": "localhost/node-dev-image" }. That image is created from an older version of a node image pulled from quay, but I receive the same "connection refused" error (after the container is built) if I replace it with an image of node:latest.

[jonah-iden]

I think this may happen because most of the communication with docker is happening via the docker REST API. I think vsocde is using exclusively dockers CLI.
As far as i can see podman supports most of the docker REST API but maybe there is some configuration missing somewhere to point dockerrode correctly to the podman api.
I would have to investigate this some more

[jonah-iden]

i found this issue with dockerrode apocas/dockerode#730
maybe there is still some incompatiblity with podmans API and dockerrode

[nicktramp]

Interesting. I'll try to dig deeper myself, but in the meantime this is sufficient info for me to mark as answered. Thank you all (and keep up the great work with Theia! 👍 ).