Offline dev containers

Background

When selecting a container image to use as a dev container, vscode will attempt to download the necassery executables to a container instance of that image. This will obviously fail in an environment without an internet connection like an airplane.

Motivation

This tool allows the necassery executables to be pre-installed on the image.

Use cases

The tool allows flexible usage. It is possible to bring the tarball that vscode will typically download yourself, To always use the latest version, or a specific vscode version. Therefore it is possible to build devcontainer images as part of a CI pipeline, on an internet enabled computer to later be transferred to an isolated network with a specific version of vscode, or even before a flight to allow work to be done when internet is unavailable.

A note on versions

A version comptability between the executables downloaded onto the container and vscode is necassery. That means that this script won't work with an image built using --version 1.92.1 when vscode 1.92.2 is used, because it will attempt to install the executables matching version 1.92.2. You must ensure version comptability. When ran without --verion or --commit, the script will use the latest version available, and thus the latest version of vscode available during the image build will need to be used.

How To Install

Shell

curl -L https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DorBreger/dl-vscode-server/main/download-vs-code.sh| bash -s -- "linux"

Docker

ADD --chmod=777 \
    https://raw.githubusercontent.com/DorBreger/dl-vscode-server/main/download-vs-code.sh \
    .

# Install VS Code Server and Requirements For VS code 1.92.1
RUN ./download-vs-code.sh "linux" "x64" --alpine --extensions dbaeumer.vscode-eslint --version 1.92.1

How To Use

download-vs-code.sh [options] <PLATFORM> [<ARCH>]

Example:

download-vs-code.sh "linux" "x64" --alpine

Options

--insider Switches to the pre-released version of the binary chosen (server or CLI).

--dump-sha Will print the latest commit sha for VS Code (server and CLI are current synced and always the same)

--tar Allows to specify the tarball path to use for the installation. This allows building dev containers as part of a CI process in an isolated or air-gapped environment.

--cli Switches the binary download VS Code CLI.

--dump-tar Download the vscode server tar and exit

--version The version of vscode server to match againt. Incompatible with --commit.

--commit The commit hash to use for the download, instead of fetching the latest. Incompatible with --version

--alpine Only works when downloading VS Code Server, it will force PLATFORM=linux and ARCH=alpine, as the developers deviated from the standard format used for all others.

-h, --help Print this usage info

--extensions specify which extensions to install. expects a string of full extension names seperated by commas, e.g ms-vscode.PowerShell,redhat.ansible,ms-python.vscode-pylance

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