[Announcement] Revised process for dev container community contributions

[samruddhikhandale]

UPDATE: See below for additional information on publishing your own definitions / templates and read on for information on contributing features and where images are now being built!

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Latest context

Hi dev container community! We appreciate your continued patience as we work to make dev containers a great experience and open specification, and we're excited to share with you the latest plan for community contributions (which we've been crafting since #1291).

New repos

As mentioned, we recently announced the dev container specification. As part of this, we now have a devcontainers GitHub org, and we place repos related to the spec in this org.

We recently open sourced two new devcontainers repos:

• https://github.com/devcontainers/features
• https://github.com/devcontainers/images

As shown in the repos, we are hosting a specific set of features and images that were previously in this repository. Please log issues in this new location.

Also note that we will soon also have a repo for a subset of dev container definitions (a.k.a. templates) in the containers folder of this repository. We expect the distribution model for templates to be similar to Features - but this is not quite ready.

How can I contribute or create new content?

While you could always publish your own dev container image, you can now publish Features as well! This means you can make updates and fixes at any cadence you like! To get started, use this 'features' template repo to create a set of features. It includes a GitHub Actions workflow to automate the publishing process. If you want more details, you can read more about the features portion of spec at containers.dev.

If you've contributed a definition/template in the past, consider whether a Dev Container Feature may be better. Features allow your contribution to be added to any supported base image, rather than just the one in the template.

If you still want to contribute a definition/template in addition or instead, stay tuned for information on how you can self-publish these as well!

If you'd like your contributions to appear in VS Code or GitHub Codespaces UI for dev container creation, you may do the following soon (this is still a work in progress):

• Go to https://github.com/devcontainers/devcontainers.github.io
• Open a PR to modify the collection-index.yml file. For example, the entry for features published out of devcontainers/features looks like:

- name: Reference Implementation Features
  maintainer: Dev Container Spec Maintainers
  contact: https://github.com/devcontainers/features/issues
  repository: https://github.com/devcontainers/features
  ociReference: ghcr.io/devcontainers/features

The ociReference attribute is an auto-generated "metadata" artifact generated by the devcontainers GitHub action. It contains a JSON file with information about all features published under that namespace (by default <owner>/<repo>).

What happens to this vscode-dev-containers repo?

We will ultimately be archiving this repository and focusing new work on the repos in the devcontainers org. We will not delete or hide this repo. However, we won't archive the repository until we've migrated the dev container definitions / templates as well. We expect the general model for distributing templates to be the same as Features - so stay tuned for more information on that!

Feedback

Please feel free to reach out via comments in this issue or through issues in our various devcontainer org repos with any questions or feedback on this process or experience - we'd love to hear how it goes for you. We look forward to your feedback and great dev container contributions!

[samruddhikhandale]

By August 31st, you will see the following changes:

• Features: We’ve migrated a set of Features to the new repo devcontainers/features, and any current references to these Features will automatically map to the new repo. Features that are not part of the new repo will continue to be referenced from vscode-dev-containers.
• Images: We will now be publishing images from devcontainers/images (with path mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/*). For backwards compatibility, we will be retagging the current images so that your existing dev container configurations continue to work.

[samruddhikhandale]

Hi @andreiborisov 👋 , would you like to self-publish the homebrew and fish Features? We’d love to ensure the community can continue effectively using your great Features, and we're happy to discuss any feedback you may have on the new process.