Visual Studio Code devcontainers for development with Laravel Sail

As part of my on-going plan to have fewer local dev tools running on my main machine, I have started using devcontainers for my Laravel/PHP development. This blog post goes into detail on why and how to use devcontainers and what benefits they can bring.

What's a devcontainer?

A devcontainer is a way to isolate a development environment and run it in a Docker container - complete with VS Code extensions. Your local machine just has Visual Studio Code. Extensions are run within the container so your host system remains clean. You can easily switch projects and that will switch the active extensions - with them running remotely in docker!

You don't even need to have Docker installed locally with the help of the VS Code Remote SSH extension. I run a Hyper-V VM that itself hosts Docker and Laravel Sail.

And one other plus - you don't need to have a local version of the code on your own machine.

At the moment, it's true that devcontainers work best in VS Code with limited support in other IDEs/editors such as the JetBrains range.

Pre-existing Setup

I have a Hyper-V Linux VM (Ubuntu) running on a Windows host.

The Windows host does not have Docker installed.

The Windows host ONLY has Visual Studio Code installed.

The Windows host has Dev Containers extension installed locally and Remote - SSH extension installed locally.

The Windows host has a project set up to connect via SSH to the guest VM's project directory.

The VM has Docker installed.

The VM has a pre-configured Laravel Sail application.

Getting Started

When you first install Sail pass in the --devcontainer flag:

php artisan sail:install --devcontainer

If you've already installed Sail, you can pull out the devcontainer.json from GitHub here.

Open your .devcontainer.json and update the name to something meaningful.

Decide what extensions you actually want to run remotely. For me, at the mo, it's:

"extensions": [
    "laravel.vscode-laravel",
    "bmewburn.vscode-intelephense-client"
],

Spin up Sail in the usual way for your app: ./vendor/laravel/sail/bin/sail up -d

What do you get?

Terminal automatically connects into the main Sail web image from which you can run php artisan or other commands.

Extensions automatically install and run on the VM, not the host running VS Code.

Mounted file system with minimal latency. It's worth noting, the Code SSH extensions do install some binaries on the remote machine - this is for more efficient data exchange.