Multiple devcontainers in vscode-remote

Question

I have a project that creates multiple Docker images. I would like to setup a devcontainer in vscode-remote for each image so that I may spin up a container for each image.

I only need to spin up and connect to one container/image at a time.

Is it supported to have multiple devcontainer files? Maybe something like .devcontainer/devcontainer1.json and .devcontainer/devcontainer2.json (supposing I only had two images that I wanted to use)?

Each devcontainer would use an image with a different name and also requires different runArgs.

Answer 1

Just found this here. I checked the documentation because I was interested in this as well. And the documentation states the following

In some cases, a single container environment isn't sufficient. Fortunately, Remote - Containers supports Docker Compose managed multi-container configurations.

You can either:

1. Work with a service defined in an existing, unmodified docker-compose.yml.
2. Create a new docker-compose.yml (or make a copy of an existing one) that you use to develop a service.
3. Extend your existing Docker Compose configuration to develop the service.
4. Use separate VS Code windows to work with multiple Docker Compose-defined services at once.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers#_using-docker-compose

Maybe you want to check this.

Documentation for your use case can be found under the following page:

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/containers-advanced#_connecting-to-multiple-containers-at-once

You do this by using docker-compose.yml and need to have a folder structure like the following: