Inroduction

• devcontainer features are a set of simple and reusable Features
• Things that are not included in base image, can be installed using feature
• ‘Features’ are self-contained units of installation code and development container configuration
• Features are designed to install atop a wide-range of base container images.
• This property is used to specify a list of features that you want to include in the development environment
• Quickly add a language/tool/CLI to a development container
• Add more tools, runtime etc. as a feature

Each feature corresponds to a specific set of tools, extensions, or configurations that you want to add to the Devcontainer

Example

Lets say we want to create a devcontainer for nodejs and typescript. And, we also want powershell & azure-cli to be installed in that devcontainer.

devcontainer.json

{
	"name": "Node.js & TypeScript",

	"image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/typescript-node:1-20-bullseye",
	
	"features": {
		"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/azure-cli:1": {},
		"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/powershell:1": {}
	}

}

Update features of existing configuration

“Dev Containers: Configure Container Features” command allows you to update an existing configuration

official and community-supported Dev Container Features

• Get official features: https://containers.dev/features
• Github repo: https://github.com/devcontainers/features/tree/main/src

Custom feature

We can create out own feature, See: https://github.com/devcontainers/feature-starter