Automating Developer Environments with Dev Containers
Introduction
Development Containers (or Dev Containers for short) have been around for a few years now (since ~2019) and have reached a level of maturity where I'm now comfortable recommending their adoption. I've found that Dev Containers are a fantastic tool to help teams build a consistent and productive Developer Experience.
In this post I'll cover what Dev Containers are, why you should use them and how to get started. While Dev Containers is an open specification that has growing cross-IDE support this post will focus primarily on using Dev Containers with Visual Studio Code (VS Code) as the IDE.