Getting Started with Visual Studio Dev Containers

Visual Studio Dev Containers offer a streamlined, consistent, and reproducible development environment by encapsulating all project dependencies and tools within a container, ensuring that developers can work on projects with minimal setup and configuration issues.

Why use VS Code Dev Containers?

• Standard development environments
• Ease of onboarding new team members
• Simplified setup for various tools and projects
• Isolation of your development environment from your local machine
• More secure than installing developer tools on your local machine

The Visual Studio Dev Containers tutorial specifies Docker as the container tool on your local machine. Docker Desktop is not free for commercial or government organizations.

Podman is a free and opensource container tools on your local environment. Podman also has the security advantage of running on windows without requiring administrative priviledges.

These are the steps to setup and use Visual Studio Code Development Containers with Podman on Windows 11

Prerequisites

1. Administrator rights on your laptop

2. Visual Studio Code installed.

3. Windows Subsystem for Linux(WSL) Installed

   1. Determine if WSL is already installed and running

      >wsl --version
      WSL version: 2.2.4.0
      Kernel version: 5.15.153.1-2
      WSLg version: 1.0.61
      MSRDC version: 1.2.5326
      Direct3D version: 1.611.1-81528511
      DXCore version: 10.0.26091.1-240325-1447.ge-release
      Windows version: 10.0.22621.4890
      

   2. If it is not installed open a command window and type

      >wsl --install
      

Step 1: Install Podman

1. Download and install Podman Desktop

   • Note: The steps below use the command line to intialize and start podman. You can do these same steps using Podman Desktop.

2. Initialize Podman

   You only need to do this once

   >podman machine init 
   

3. Start Podman

   >podman machine start
   Starting machine "podman-machine-default"
   
   This machine is currently configured in rootless mode. If your containers
   require root permissions (e.g. ports < 1024), or if you run into compatibility
   issues with non-podman clients, you can switch using the following command:
   
       podman machine set --rootful
   
   API forwarding listening on: npipe:////./pipe/docker_engine
   
   Docker API clients default to this address. You do not need to set DOCKER_HOST.
   Machine "podman-machine-default" started successfully
   

   Note: Docker desktop runs as root by default. Podman runs rootless by default. Some products like terraform login will not work unless the container is running as root. If you run into issue try running as root and see if that fixes the problem.

Step 2: Test Podman Install

1. Download and run a container image from the RedHat registry

   This step will connect to the RedHat registry.

   • Note: This will fail if you have a VPN or other network restrictions that prevent access to the RedHat registry. Disconnect from VPN to pull down images from the registry.

   >podman run ubi8-micro date
   Resolved "ubi8-micro" as an alias (/etc/containers/registries.conf.d/000-shortnames.conf)
   Trying to pull registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8-micro:latest...
   Getting image source signatures
   Checking if image destination supports signatures
   Copying blob sha256:3968a64314ecc20edd87d99ec65c7ece493f200aa996ea3abf3e5c60a6fcedbd
   Copying config sha256:d6ee2a517c2218f0d3e9aa405ecc97be6cee781db2acfac3ed5c13f051ba6a9d
   Writing manifest to image destination
   Storing signatures
   Mon Mar 31 23:56:15 UTC 2025
   

If the command is successful you will see the current date and time. This verifies Podman can run containers.

Step 3: Configure Visual Studio Code to use Podman instead of Docker

1. Open Visual Studio Code

2. Modify VSCode to use Podman for containers.

   In VSCode Go to File->Preferences->Settings and search for docker. The default settings specify docker as the container manager.

   

   Change these to use Podman:

   

Step 4: Build you Development Container

1. Open Visual Studio Code

2. Clone this repository https://github.com/scottmillers/vscode-devcontainer-example to a local directory

3. Open the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file

   {
    "name": "vscode-devcontainer-example",
    "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/base:ubuntu-22.04",
    "mounts": [
        "source=${localEnv:HOME}${localEnv:USERPROFILE},target=/host-home-folder,type=bind,consistency=cached"
    ],
    "customizations": {
        "vscode": {
            "extensions": [
                "streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker",
                "bierner.github-markdown-preview"
            ]
        }
    },
    "features": {
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/python:1": {},
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/aws-cli:1": {},
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers-extra/features/ansible:2": {},
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/terraform:1": {}
    }
   }
   

   This is the Dev Container configuration file.

   • It will use ubuntu-22.04 as the container base image
   • It will mount your host machines home directory to a directory in the container called host-home-folder
   • It will add two extension to Visual Studio code when you open the container
   • It will add python, the AWS CLI, Ansible and Terraform to the Ubuntu 22.04 base image

4. Start the Dev Container

   Open the Visual Studio Code command bar by typing Ctrl-Shift-P and search for Dev Containers. Select Dev Containers: Rebuild and Reopen in Container.

   The container build will start.

   

   The first build will take a while as it is downloading everything to create your new container. Wait for it to finish.

   When it finished you will be able to see the files in VsCode Explorer. Noice that the explorer adds the name of the Dev Container to the root directory

   

5. Open a Ubuntu 22.04 terminal window

   

6. Verify that Python and AWS are installed.

   

7. Run the Python code

   

8. Verify you can see your home folder content within the container

   The Dev Container mounts the home folder. This allows you to access your host operating system files from within the container.

   

(Optional) Step 5: Add or remove Dev Containers features

1. Add or remove features in Visual Studio code

   Open the command by typing Ctrl-Shift-P and search for Dev Containers. If you click Dev Containers: Configure Container Features container features you can add or remove features

   

   Follow the prompts and select from the list of features.

   

   Once you have selected your features the Dev Container will be rebuild.

(Optional) Step 6: Cloning your repository into WSL or a Dev Volume

You can improve the disk performance by either storing your source in the WSL 2 filesystem or cloning your repository in a container volume.