Pre-requisites

Prepare the container image

In order to allow Remote Development, the container image must have a few packages installed, such as glibc and libstdc++ for VS Code server to run.

Please refer to the Visual Studio Code Remote SSH documentation for an in-depth explanation on how things work and the system requirements.

In this example, we provide a sample on needed packages to be added for an alpine-based container image:

RUN apk add musl libgcc libstdc++ git curl wget bash ca-certificates gcompat openssh-client

Please note git was also included, and although not a strict requirement of the setup, there would be no end to this purpose if the code changes weren't saved.

Language-dependent tools

Please also note that other packages / tools may be necessary for other languages / frameworks, such as xdebug for PHP, for example. Specific configurations might also need to be defined, such as disabling the opcode cache and setting the needed debugger config values (xdebug.mode=debug, xdebug.request_start=yes and xdebug.client_host=127.0.0.1) for PHP.

Prepare VS Code Extensions

Make sure your VS Code has the right Extension installed for the programming language or framework you use.

Node

For this case, for node we installed the VS Code Extension Remote - SSH extension.

PHP

For PHP, you could use PHP Debug.