Setting up your computer to run devcontainers

We use Development Containers (devcontainers for short). These are an open source and portable way to create consistent, repeatable, and dependable full-featured development environments, independent of the machine or infrastructure that they’re running on. Devcontainers can be hosted in the cloud (for instance, GitHub Codespaces), run in a private cloud, or run on your own computer.

Under the covers, a devcontainer environment consists of:

• Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor back-end (engine) running in a
• Docker container running on a
• Linux-based host platform

The VS Code editor front-end can run within a web browser or locally on your machine. The Linux-based host platform could be a virtual machine running in the cloud or running on your local machine. Our devcontainers typically run Ubuntu Linux.

You can work with devcontainers on your own computer running macOS, Windows, or Linux.

Detailed instructions are provided for each of these operating systems:

1. Windows
2. macOS
3. Linux