Feature request: provide seamless devcontainer support

[merlijn-sebrechts]

I don't trust VSCode "devcontainers" to properly contain an LLM working on a codebase. I would really like to use LXD containers as devcontainers instead of regular Docker containers.

Workshop seems like the right tool to do this with, but it doesn't actually integrate with devcontainers.

Currently, I might be able to "hack" it by simply starting an environment and using the "Remote - SSH" extension to connect to it. But that requires a lot of manual work, and I still need to manually install the project-specific tools if there's no SDK config for this project.

I see two possible approaches:

• Create a devcontainer-like feature that uses the workshop config file instead of a devcontainer config file. This feature is part of a vscode extension and hooks into the Remote feature to the remote into the workshop environment. The downside is that the user needs to recreate the devcontainer setup scripts to configure a workshop environment instead.
• Create an integration between devcontainers and workshop that runs the devcontainer inside of the workshop environment. This would be the most seamless experience, but might be a bit more complicated/convoluted.

What do you think?

[jonathan-conder]

We have a vscode extension in the works.

In the meantime, the Remote SSH workflow is actually quite simple in the latest release. Make sure your workshop has been launched recently to enable these features.

1. Add this to your ~/.ssh/config:

Include /var/snap/workshop/current/ssh/<UID>/config

(replace <UID> with your user ID, i.e. id -u). ⚠️ This is currently undocumented and might be subject to change in future.

2. Find the workshop's hostname:

$ workshop info | grep hostname
hostname:  dev.myproject.wp

3. Run vscode:

$ code --folder-uri vscode-remote://ssh-remote+dev.myproject.wp/project

(replace dev.myproject.wp with the actual hostname).

You're welcome to run a devcontainer inside a workshop if that's something you want to do, but our main focus is to support SDKs as the mechanism of setting up the container environment. The quickest way to convert your devcontainer setup into this language is probably to sketch an SDK.

[jonathan-conder]

Since you mentioned LLMs, I think we want to explore that area to make authoring SDKs easier; a skill or something to convert an existing devcontainer into a workshop or SDK might be useful.