Improve default experience with Devcontainers

[zroug]

Using Devcontainers is a nice way to develop when there are issues with VSCode being sandboxed. Getting Devcontainers to work from the VSCode Flatpak is easy. Just create a simple wrapper script

#!/bin/sh
exec flatpak-spawn --host docker "$@"

and point the Devcontainer extension to it.

I suggest to ship this wrapper with the VSCode Flatpak, so that the Devcontainer extension works out of the box. Having the same wrapper for Podman might be a good idea too. Another option would be to describe this workaround in flatpak-warning.txt.

[duesenfranz]

Currently, this requires the flatpak to be run with --filesystem=/tmp, as vs code puts a Dockerfile into /temp/vsch and then points docker to it.

[FilBot3]

Is this related to Issue #55 ?

[FilBot3]

See my Comment here: Issue #55 (comment)

[samuel-garmany]

I'm hoping to revive this issue because so far it's been the best answer for getting devcontainers to work with the flatpak. Even if we don't ship the wrapper script, having the instructions in the readme.md would be useful. We could include instructions for docker and podman and put that in the startup page.

I've tested the podman sdk from Issue #55 but it didn't work for me. I think @zroug has the best solution around.

[lbssousa]

See also: https://gist.github.com/lbssousa/bb081e35d483520928033b2797133d5e

[samuel-garmany]

@lbssousa I’ve seen that option before and I think I've seen your post on the Fedora Forums with those instructions too. I did have that working for a while but it broke and I never got it set back up, I think using a wrapper script is a more stable way to make devcontainers work.

It also has the added benefit of not requiring any extra configuration to the flatpak sandbox or podman. You can put the script in your flatpak folder and everything is in the same place and will be deleted when you delete the flatpak app.

I just think this is a better solution for most people and it’d be easy to write a tutorial for.

[lbssousa]

Recent VSCode Flatpak releases already ship host-spawn, a replacement for flatpak-spawn --host which does exactly the same thing as the wrapper script proposed here does (unless you want to inject some environment variables before spawning podman from host), which can be easily shimmed to podman command. It's just a matter of creating a symlink to /app/bin/host-spawn named podman and placing it somewhere in the flatpak sandbox environment's PATH (e.g. ${HOME}/.var/app/com.visualstudio.code/data/node_modules/bin). If PR #469 is merged, this last step wouldn't even be necessary.

@samuel-garmany , have you tried it? Which kind of problems did you have?

[samuel-garmany]

I have been using host-spawn in my script and I wasn't suggesting that the original script should be exactly the one we suggest but I do think as of now it's the best solution. I hope PR #469 can make the docker/podman experience more in-line with the deb/rpm package and I think that getting containers working is crucial here. I'll be excited for it to "just work" but in the meantime I think that having an easy solution that doesn't need a bunch of other configuring is I think a good thing.

Your solution worked really well for me despite the tricky setup from about October to December last year but I came back one day and it wasn't working and I couldn't get it to play nice again. I switched to the rpm recently but decided to check out the flatpak again and got a wrapper script up in no time.

Again thank you for your work, I really appreciate it and I don't have the skills to be the one to really make the flatpak feel native but until it does I found this solution works for me and I think we should recommend it to others.