Creating a Dev Container for TypeScript and VS Code — Part 1

Full-time nodejs dev container for less installation effort and more consistency.

The Dev Container in Action

In this article:

• Minimizing pre-requisites
• Detailed explanation of dev container related files
• Creating a Dev Container for TypeScript
• Controlling the content of the dev container
• Controlling the version of nodejs and npm
• Selecting VS Code Extensions
• Bonus: Resolving Some Common Issues in Corporate Environments

This is part 1 of a two-part article. Part 2 can be found here.

Introduction

Containerization as a concept for deploying SaaS (Software as a Service) products has now been established for quite some time. AWS, Azure, Google, Portainer and others offer a range of options for deploying and managing container-based systems.

In this article I will demonstrate how to create a dev container for TypeScript from scratch. You will need to have a basic understand of Docker. You need to understand the difference between a container image (short “image”) and a container instance (aka “container”) and how a container is…