What are Dev Containers?

With modern development it can be complex, Engineers and developers juggle multiple projects, each with unique tools, dependencies, and configurations. Switching between these environments or collaborating with others often leads to frustration and wasted time. 

This is where Dev Containers can play a huge role. In this article, we’ll explore what Dev Containers are, why they’re worth using, and how they can simplify your workflow while boosting collaboration and productivity.

What Are Dev Containers?

Have you ever heard the phrase, “It works on my machine”?, it’s a common frustration among software developers, or anyone who works within development environments. 

Maintaining a development environment that works for all your projects can be a frustrating and never-ending battle. 

This is where Dev Containers can help, no matter what machine you are working on. 

Dev Containers are portable, lightweight environments configured using Docker containers.  They allow engineers to define and share their development environment through configuration files. 

With Dev Containers your entire environment - all the dependencies, tools, and extensions are defined within code and that means it’s easy to spin up a container and reproduce that environment and share it with colleagues to ensure consistency. So we can stop hearing that “it works on my machine” phrase. 

Why Use Dev Containers?

Beyond the consistency reason to use Dev Containers there are a number of benefits you can see if you start to work with them. 

1. Solve dependency issues:  We’ve all faced it. Mismatched library versions or incompatible runtime environments. When we encapsulate our environment all inside a Dev Container those issues don’t exist, you can spend time working on the code instead of trying to find the right library to install. 
2. Portability: Maybe you have a Windows laptop and a MacBook you work on.  Dev Containers work on either, you can switch between those two machines, fire up your Dev Container and have a consistent environment to work on, regardless of the hardware you are using or the operating system. 
3. Experimentation without risk: If you want to try a new tool or new library or framework, you can spin up a Dev Container and try it without breaking your local environment. Experiment without causing issues is a great way of learning. 
4. Seamless integration with tools: Dev Containers work seamlessly with tools like Visual Studio Code (VS Code), if you install the Dev Containers extension within VS Code it will automatically detect the Dev Containers configuration file and sets up the environment for you. 

Best Practices for Using Dev Containers

When you are running Dev Containers there are some best practices you should follow: 

• Include your .devcontainer folder in your version control system, this ensures that everyone on your team can access the same configuration and changes to it are tracked. 
• Only include tools and dependencies you actually need, don’t make it to complex. 
• When you are creating your devcontainer.json configuration file make sure you add in comments so that others can understand the setup and stay informed of any changes to it. 
• Containers can sometimes introduce performance overhead, particularly on systems with limited resources. Optimize your Docker settings and ensure that your base image is lightweight.

Conclusion

Dev Containers can be game changers to ensure that everyone has a consistent and reliable workspace to develop within.  

Whether you are collaborating with a large team, working on open-source projects, or even just looking for a cleaner way to manage your development environment, Dev Containers are work exploring.