Proposal: Add a devcontainer config for VS Code / Github Codespaces

[pomdtr]

I did not find a way to effectively integrate devbox with vscode. As the broad majority of devs are using this editor these days, this is a concern for adoption in large teams.

You can start a devbox shell in the vscode terminal, but it does not set the env of all other vscode process (tasks, debugger, extensions...)

I feel like writing a devcontainer could be a great way to fix this (and free user for the required nix dependency), but I was not successful in implementing it.

[Lagoja]

Hey @pomdtr, we'll look into this feature. Is this something you use to develop locally on your own machine as well? Or is it for remote development?

[pomdtr]

I use this workflow both on my local machine and my remote workspaces. It allows me to get an uniform dev env across all my devices.

[mohsenari]

@pomdtr We recently published the first version of devbox VSCode extension. We'll try to see if we can have the environment for the whole IDE (debugger & path to binaries and dependencies) be updated by the extension. Devcontainer seems like a possible solution as well. We'll update under this issue once we have a solution to move forward on this.

[mohsenari]

on a local environment a workaround for the time being is to open your terminal (outside of IDE) go to devbox shell, then open your IDE from inside devbox shell.

cd my-devbox-project/
devbox shell
code .

[pomdtr]

Cool ! Here is an interesting read on the devcontainer / nix integration: https://levelup.gitconnected.com/vs-code-remote-containers-with-nix-2a6f230d1e4e

[pomdtr]

I've got a draft version working for devbox. Please take a look at it: https://github.com/pomdtr/devbox-devcontainer

[mohsenari]

@pomdtr Thanks for sharing this. I don't have codespaces enabled on my github account but I tested it locally with Docker desktop and Dev Containers extension on VSCode and it woks great. Although, it runs vscode from inside a Docker container with a shared volume between the host machine and Docker. That means in a non-Linux OS there might be a performance hit.

That said, I really liked the Dev Containers extension when it detects a .devcontainer it prompts with "Reopen this in devcontainers". Maybe we can add a similar functionality to Devbox's extension. Because if we open vscode from inside a devbox shell, the language binaries and interpreter settings in vscode will be set to devbox's shell environment.

[pomdtr]

I think the performance hit should be quite minimal since the bind mount only contains the workspace folder. There are way to mitigate the performance penalty (see : https://code.visualstudio.com/remote/advancedcontainers/improve-performance)