VSCode Setup for Fedora Silverblue

After flip-flopping between installing Visual Studio Code inside a distrobox container, layering it on my Fedora Silverblue install and just using nano + terminal for development, I have finally settled on using the following VSCode setup with Dev Containers.

Setting up VSCode + Dev Containers

• Download the VSCode appimage from valicm’s GitHub repo and install it using Gear Lever.

• Install podman-compose.

• Enable the podman socket for your user.

  systemctl enable --user --now podman.socket
  

• Install the Dev Containers VSCode extension.

• Goto the Dev Containers extension’s settings.

• Set the following values for the fields below:

  • Dev > Containers: Docker Compose Path -> podman-compose
  • Dev > Containers: Docker Path -> podman
  • Dev > Containers: Docker Socket Path ->
    (whatever socket path systemctl status --user podman.socket | grep Listen: shows)

Using Dev Containers for development

Dev Containers basically creates a Docker/OCI container for your project from the configuration located inside the .devcontainer folder in your project’s topmost directory.
VSCode then SSH’s into it so you can develop inside the container as-if it was your own system.
This is the same concept as toolbx. (discussed here)

You can find my devcontainer configs at https://github.com/ScatteredCognition/devcontainers/