Understanding the Gitspace Configuration

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This guide will walk you through the Gitspace configuration in detail.

Each time a new Gitspace is created, a dedicated Development Container is provisioned on a separate Virtual Machine (VM), providing an isolated and secure development environment.

This Development Container allows you to work within a containerized version of a build environment. Simply put, it offers a pre-configured, ready-to-code setup directly within your IDE, allowing you to start coding instantly.

Development Containers

Development Containers (also known as Dev Containers) are an open source specification for developing consistent and feature-rich development environments.

This specification equips containers with all the tools, libraries and runtimes required to enable seamless development inside them. The development environment is configured based on metadata defined in this specification. Each Development Container is defined by a devcontainer.json file, which configures the containerized development environment.

devcontainer.json File

Gitspace configuration lives with your source code in the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json file within your project’s repository. This file contains all necessary metadata and settings to define your development environment.

The devcontainer.json specification includes various properties, allowing you to customize the environment.

Currently, we support the following properties in a devcontainer.json file: (additional properties coming soon, read more about the devcontainer metadata reference here)

Argument	Usage
image	Image used to create the container
forwardPorts	Array of ports to be forwarded from the Gitspace to the local machine (including inside the web)
postCreateCommand	Command to be executed after the Gitspace is created
postStartCommand	Command to be executed after the Gitspace is started
runArgs	Array of Docker CLI arguments to be used when running the Gitspace
containerEnv	Name-value pairs that sets/overrides environment variables for the container
containerUser	Defines the user for all operations run as inside the container
remoteUser	Defines the user that devcontainer.json supporting services tools / runs as in the container (including lifecycle scripts and any remote editor/IDE server processes)
extensions	Array of extension IDs that specifies which extensions should be installed when the Gitspace is created

The path for this configuration file is .devcontainer/devcontainer.json

Example devcontainer.json File

{
	"image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/javascript-node:1-18-bullseye",
	"forwardPorts": [9000],
	"postCreateCommand": "yarn install",
	"postStartCommand": "npm install",
	"containerEnv": {
    		"MY_CONTAINER_VAR": "abcd",
    		"MY_CONTAINER_VAR2": "efgh"
	},
	"vscode": {
      "extensions": ["streetsidesoftware.code-spell-checker"]
    },
	"runArgs": ["--restart=no", "--security-opt", "seccomp=unconfined"],
	"containerUser": "root",
	"remoteUser": "vscode"
}

Default Image

You can specify the image required to create the container in the devcontainer.json file. Any necessary application dependencies can be pre-installed in this image to save setup time.

If a repository does not have a devcontainer.json, we will spin up the CDE with a default docker image at mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:dev-ubuntu-24.04. The Dockerfile for this default image is available at default image.