Devcontainers Best Practices

This skill guides you to the right documentation and references for the Development Container ecosystem. Use it when working with devcontainer.json, selecting Features or Templates, or when the user asks about dev containers, containers.dev, or supporting tools.

Quick start

Minimal devcontainer.json using an image and a Feature: "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:ubuntu", "features": { "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/git:1": {} }. For property details and validation, see Quick lookup item 1 and references/schema.md.

When to use this skill

• Editing or validating devcontainer.json
• Looking up a property (syntax, type, tool support)
• Choosing or referencing a Feature or Template
• Checking which tools support the spec or have tool-specific properties/limitations
• Understanding the spec (lifecycle, merge logic, image metadata)
• Authoring or publishing a Dev Container Feature (see the Authoring section in references/features.md and the containers.dev authoring guide)
• Configuring multiple dev containers (multi-project, shared Compose); see references/tools.md and VS Code / multi-container docs

Canonical sources