.Net Development Environment

You can pull this image from Docker Hub.

docker pull cmiles74/docker-vscode

After much grinding and gnashing of teeth, I finally gave up on getting the .Net packages up-and-running on my Arch Linux machine. It just wasn't working and it was far too much of an uphill battle. This Docker image contains all of the same tools, but wrapped up in an Debian Jesse installation. Even so, the image is still way too big; if you have any tips that might help me slim it down, please let me know! And, if you'd like to encourage my meager work on this fairly dull project...

This image contains...

• Linux, Debian Jesse
• The latest Visual Studio Code release
• The latest Emacs release, with Spacemacs + Javascript
• A New-ish .Net CLI tools
• Mono
• The latest NPM, ready to install packages without root
• Git
• The Hack font and Flat Plat GTK 2+3 theme
• Firefox

Port 5000 is exposed, that is the default port used when running .Net applications. The following mount points may also exposed, simply edit the included "run" script.

• /developer/.config/Code
• /developer/.vscode
• /developer/project

The first three can be mapped into your home directory (to save settings across all projects) or somewhere else (maybe your project folder). The last should be mapped to your .Net project's source code directory. You can map in your .ssh keys and git configuration as well.

• /developer/.ssh
• /developer/.gitconfig

To be clear, this image is based on the .Net Core Docker image releasd by Microsoft.

Running the Image

When you're ready to run the image, you will probably want to write a little script to handle starting up the container and launching applications. Here's one that will do what you want.

#!/bin/bash

# start vscode
docker run -d \
  -d \
  -v /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix:rw \
  -v ${PWD}:/developer/project \
  -e DISPLAY=unix${DISPLAY} \
  -p 5000:5000 \
  --device /dev/snd \
  --name myproject-vscode \
  cmiles74/docker-vscode

docker exec myproject-vscode /developer/bin/start-vscode
docker exec myproject-vscode /developer/bin/start-emacs

You can place this script in your project directory and run it right from there. It will map in the project files, your Visual Studio Code settings from your home directory, allow X11 access to your host environment and map in your display and sound. Lastly, it will launch Visual Studio Code and Emacs.

To shutdown the container, simply close or exit the terminal window.

Once it's launched, there are a couple setup tasks that I haven't yet automated into the image.

Get a Terminal Session

The script above will start the container and open up an terminal, Code and Emacs. Visual Studio Code also has an integrated terminal, you can toggle it's visibility from under the "View" menu. By default, terminal sessions do not read ".bash_profile" and so they won't be able to see binaries installed by NPM. To remedy this, open your "User Settings" (from under "Preferences") and add one of the following:

// Linux
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.linux": ["-l"]

// OS X
"terminal.integrated.shellArgs.osx": ["-l"]

Additional Packages for Emacs

If you're using Emacs, you'll want to install tern, js-beautify and jshint with NPM. These modules are used to support the Emacs Javascript mode.

If you're working with React, you'll want to install eslint, babel-eslint and eslint-plugin-react with NPM. These are used to support the React mode. Check out the Spacemacs React documentation page for more information.

Firefox

Firefox is included with this image to support the opening of web links from inside Visual Studio Code. For instance, if you choose "Release Notes" from under the "Help" menu, Code will attempt to open the URL with "xdg-open". To make this all work, xdg-open is acutally a soft link to the Firefox binary (I didn't want to install and XDG compliant desktop environment).

Presently the multi-process (electrolysis) version of Firefox is super crashy under Docker. If you're using Firefox often, open the "Preferences" and uncheck the "Enable multi-process Firefox Developer Edition" option.

If you already have Firefox running, the Firefox binary will detect this and it will open the URL in your running (outside of Docker) Firefox instance. This is probably the best way to go.

Anyway, with all of this setup and working, you can launch a "Web" debug session and actually view the site in Firefox. If you'd like to use another browser, feel free to customize the Docker script.

Since release 52, Firefox isn't running from inside the container. :-( For now, Firefox is on version 49.