rucer/devenv repository overview

⁠Development Environment

Package all commonly used runtimes and tools in a single container, and run as a main entrypoint of development. You can find the built image in DockerHub⁠.

⁠Run Image

It's recommended to use this image with VS Code Remote.

docker volume create devenv-code
docker volume create devenv-share

docker run -d \
  --name devenv \
  --hostname devenv \
  --restart unless-stopped \
  --init \
  -p 2026:22 \
  -v devenv-code:/root/code \
  -v devenv-share:/root/share \
  rucer/devenv

⁠Keep Container Running

The container will start a foreground sleep infinity process as default command, so you needn't to do anything to keep the container running. The container will automatically start an OpenSSH server, to connect the container externally, you should create password for root user by the following commands:

# To set password silently in a single line
$ usermod --password $(echo ${PASSWORD} | openssl passwd -1 -stdin) root

# Or set password interactively
$ passwd

It's recommended to add the --init flag while running the container, since the container is designed to run continuously with multiple services, --init will assign a tiny init process to reap zombie processes.

⁠Daemon Tasks

The container will create several background tasks through the supervisord by default, the detailed tasks could be found under /etc/supervisor/conf.d directory. All the tasks are briefly listed as follows:

⁠Features

The following tables outline several categories, each of them contains a list of well-chosen packages and components.

⁠Base

⁠System

⁠Network

⁠Runtimes

⁠Tools

⁠Fun

⁠Notes

⁠Build Image Through GitHub Action

Shall error occurs in COPY/ADD instruction while building docker images in GitHub actions, use the following command to modify the Dockerfile before building as a workaround:

$ sed -i -E "s/COPY --from(.*)/RUN true\nCOPY --from\1/" deploy/Dockerfile

⁠Git Configuration

There are some built-in Git configurations inside the image, you can override them by executing the following commands or by editing ${HOME}/.gitconfig directly.

$ git config --global user.name "${YOUR_NAME_HERE}"
$ git config --global user.email "${YOU_EMAIL_HERE}"
$ git config --global --unset branch.master.pushRemote

⁠Use SSH Tunnel

If you want to expose your services inside container to host machine without publishing extra ports through docker, SSH tunneling is your best option. Say you want to expose the Express server(which runs on port 3000) inside container to host(by port 8000), you can execute the following command in your host machine:

$ ssh -L 8000:127.0.0.1:3000 -p ${SSH_PORT} [email protected]

⁠Syslog

Since the whole image is a minimized Ubuntu OS, some important components are not installed within it naturally, in which rsyslog is one of the most important things. Many system services rely on rsyslog to create the log messages, such as sshd. The /var/log/auth.log won't be created without rsyslog, then you can't use fail2ban because of the lacking of log files neither. You can find a detailed explanation here⁠.

The image will install the rsyslog package and register rsyslogd as a supervisor service. You can use the functionalities of rsyslog without doing anything additionally, but you should be aware of the background rsyslog service.

⁠Snapd

It's a pity that the snapd⁠ can't(or hardly can) be installed inside a docker image.

⁠WSL Resource Quota

When you are using this container on Windows platform, the best practice is to set resource quota of WSL. You can reference the WSL configuration example⁠ to set it. Here is the simplified WSL configuration dedicated for resource quota.

[wsl2]
processors = 4
memory = 16GB
swap = 8GB

⁠Windows Volume Mount

Interop between Docker container and direct Windows file systems could be extremely slow because of WSL's nature. So it's recommended to not directly mount volumes from Windows platform to the container. You can create named volume or mount files from inside WSL systems like WSL for Ubuntu to solve this problem.