Specification
How to contribute to the Development Container Specification
We’re excited for your contributions to the Dev Container Specification! This document outlines how you can get involved.
Contribution approaches
- Propose the change via an issue in the dev-container-spec repo. Try to get early feedback before spending too much effort formalizing it.
- More formally document the proposed change in terms of properties and their semantics. Look to format your proposal like our devcontainer.json reference, which is a JSON with Comments (jsonc) format.
Here is a sample proposal:
| Property | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
image |
string | Required when using an image. The name of an image in a container registry (DockerHub, GitHub Container Registry, Azure Container Registry) that VS Code and other devcontainer.json supporting services / tools should use to create the dev container. |
- PRs to the schema, i.e code or shell scripts demonstrating approaches for implementation.
Once there is discussion on your proposal, please also open and link a PR to update the devcontainer.json reference doc. When your proposal is merged, the docs will be kept up-to-date with the latest spec.
Contributing tool-specific support
Tool-specific properties are contained in namespaces in the "customizations" property. For instance, VS Code specific properties are formated as:
// Configure tool-specific properties.
"customizations": {
// Configure properties specific to VS Code.
"vscode": {
// Set *default* container specific settings.json values on container create.
"settings": {},
// Additional VS Code specific properties...
}
},
You may propose adding a new namespace for a specific tool, and any properties specific to that tool.
Review process
We use the following labels in the dev-container-spec repo:
proposal: Issues under discussion, still collecting feedback.finalization: Proposals we intend to make part of the spec.
Milestones use a “month year” pattern (i.e. January 2022). If a finalized proposal is added to a milestone, it is intended to be merged during that milestone.