michidk/vscli

Support with repos with multiple devcontainer configurations

dustinchilson opened this issue · 8 comments

dustinchilson commented

I have a repo that has a couple services in it each with their own devcontainer config it looks kinda like this

.devcontainer
  service1
    devcontainer.json
  service2
    devcontainer.json
src
  service1
    ...
  service2
    ...

When I run the app to launch my editor it doesn't detect any of the configurations

image

version 0.1.7

https://containers.dev/implementors/spec/#devcontainerjson
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-docs/blob/main/remote-release-notes/v1_75.md#folders-with-multiple-devcontainerjson-files

michidk commented

Very interesting, I didn't know about this feature yet - but I definitely want to use it in future.

So I have the following idea in mind about how this could work:
We add an arg --select container_name, which will then open the specified devcontainer.
If you open a multi-container project without this arg, we will detect that and reply with a list of available devcontainers. Later we could also use a TUI (similar to the recent-ui feature) for that.

Let me know what you think.

  • 👍2
dustinchilson commented

I suspect this solution will work, I started to work on on something to handle that scenario. Still new with rust so still wrapping my head around the code so no promises.

  • 👍1
michidk commented

So that the app crashed (panicked) was actually a bug, which is now fixed.
The fix is available in v0.1.13.

So when opening a multi-devcontainer environment now, this error will show:
I: Devcontainer not found, opening the classic way...

I currently work on v0.2, which will add support for multi-devcontainer environments.

michidk commented

I created this: #36
Basically craws all devcontainers, assigns them an index and adds a command that can be used to select them.

However, I am not quite sure if this is actually possible.
The way to open a devcontainer boils down to call vscode-remote://dev-container+{hex encoded path to workspace}{folder inside the container}
I am not quite sure how one would tell vscode which devcontainer to actually use.

michidk commented

Okay, I found a way by basically disassembling the vscode devcontainer extension. And its a bit more involved than I thought, but it is indeed possible!

michidk commented

So the implementation is done and works. It can be tested on the multi-devcontainers branch: https://github.com/michidk/vscli/tree/multi-devcontainers

In this branch, I also changed a bunch of other stuff. Basically, the code is a lot better now and the behavior is clearer to understand.
Oh and this is a breaking change. The commands changed (it's now vscli open to open dev containers) and the history file was renamed.

michidk commented

This was implemented with the release of version 0.2.0.

Since this was a really interesting journey, I made a write-up of how I figured that one out. You can read it over here: https://blog.lohr.dev/launching-dev-containers-from-code-is-impossible

dustinchilson commented

Works great, thanks.

Interesting read on the blog.