Dev Container Support

With the v3.5.3 release and a newly created dockerfile, a dev container can now be build using the update-dev build script in the DMLA Launcher repository. The script only supports Linux environments (but WSL works well), as the final goal is to have a workflow that creates a container with everything preinstalled, so that the environment is ready to use within 20-30 seconds from the initial pull.

No setup is required other than installing the official dev-containers extension from VS Code marketplace. With the plugin installed, VS Code will prompt the user to reload the workspace in the dev container, or the Dev Containers: Reopen in Container can be used to load the workspace within the container.

No port-forwarding or environment setup is necessary, but an additional experiment involving code-server is underway, as this could reduce our dependencies to docker (i.e. VS Code would not be required, as code-server provides an environment that runs in the browser).

An experimental repository containing the workspace is available: gergelygembela/dmla-codespaces. Wile the repository could/will be used as a starting point for public releases, please not share or redistribute the contents of this repository, its sole purpose is to provide a workspace for testing!

GitHub Codespaces

The should work in GitHub codespaces, accessible from the upper-right green code menu on GitHub.

Known issues

The VS Code extension cannot be updated using the launcher until the code-server alias is created. This requires further testing, or preferably a dev-container specific workaround built-in to the launcher.