Install additional packages in vscode dev container

Question

I am using vscode as an editor. Using vscode ctrl+shift+p to open up the command pallet and used "Dev Containers: Create Dev container" to create a development container, And it created only one file .devcontainer/devcontainer.json .

{
    "name": "Debian",
    "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:bullseye",
    "features": {
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/docker-from-docker:1": {},
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/github-cli:1": {},
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/go:1": {},
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/python:1": {},
        "ghcr.io/guiyomh/features/golangci-lint:0": {}
    }
}

But I would like to install few other packages like jinja2-cli after installation of python/pip3 package mentioned in the features or may be install other OS related packages.

Where should packages should be specified ?

Answer 1

Check that this line is included in your devcontainer.json

"postCreateCommand": "pip3 install --user -r requirements.txt",

Then create a requirements.txt file on the same level as you .devcontainer folder (not inside of it, outside).

If you add a package name to the requirements.txt file, it'll be added to the devcontainer at build time.

You can see an example in this pull request I recently completed which needed a new package and I had to add it to my devcontainer in the last commit.

Side note: You'll see that I also updated my poetry.lock file in a previous commit (using the poetry add package-name in the command line) because that project uses poetry for package management too. You don't need to do that if you aren't using poetry.