I have a set of preferred tools that I want available in any devcontainer, as well as several dotfiles repositories to configure my desired development environment.
I've previously (ab)used the Dev Containers extension's built in dotfiles support, but it:
- doesn't allow multiple dotfiles repositories (a key use case for me)
- relies on an install script in the repository (which feels like an unsuitable concern for a repository of configuration files)
- clones the repository from origin every time (which requires SSH agent confirmation and needs "human in the loop" during setup, and means changes on the host don't get picked up until push and a full container rebuild)
This feature:
- Installs a set of packages in the container (including
rcmfor dotfiles management) - Mounts my dotfiles repositories into the container
- Installs the dotfiles
This feature is intended to be configured as part of my personal user settings as a default feature
for all devcontainers (through dev.containers.defaultFeatures). It's obviously specific to me,
and coupled to my canonical directory layout and dotfiles repositories.