How to Configure Renovate to Update DevContainer Images

How to Configure Renovate to Update DevContainer Images

In this blog post, we explore the process of configuring Renovate to automatically update DevContainer images. Development containers offer lightweight, portable development environments, defined through a devcontainer.json file. However, manually updating image references within this file can be tedious and error-prone.

We delve into how Renovate, an automated dependency update tool, can be tailored to handle DevContainer files efficiently. By leveraging Renovate’s custom managers and flexible template system, developers can seamlessly manage DevContainer image updates, enhancing workflow efficiency and reducing manual overhead.

Using DevContainer CLI to Build Multi-Platform Images with Embedded Features

Using DevContainer CLI to Build Multi-Platform Images with Embedded Features

Development Containers represent a paradigm shift in software development methodology, encapsulating comprehensive development environments within containerized configurations. This approach addresses the imperative need for consistency across diverse development environments by packaging essential tools, libraries, and configurations within self-contained units. Developers can utilize DevContainers to seamlessly share and replicate their development setups, fostering collaboration and enabling a hassle-free onboarding process for new team members. This enhances efficiency, reduces setup time, and mitigates compatibility issues, ultimately streamlining the development workflow.

The DevContainers CLI is a robust command-line interface integral to managing and manipulating development containers. However, nothing is bug-free, and this post details a troubleshooting experience with the DevContainers CLI to build development multi-architecture development container images with embedded features.

Speeding up Docker Builds With eatmydata

Quite often, one of the most time-taking parts of the build process is the installation of dependencies. This process is traditionally slow because package managers choose stability over performance. And this perfectly makes sense: if something terrible happens, the system must remain in a usable state.

However, stability is not very important when building an image: if the build fails, the system discards the image, and you have to start over.

This post provides some tips on how to use eatmydata to speed up some operations by the example of Debian-based images.

How to Make Lando Work with Ubuntu 20.04

How to Make Lando Work with Ubuntu 20.04

Lando is a local development environment and DevOps tool built on Docker container technology, aimed at providing an easy way for developers to specify requirements for their projects. It provides installation packages for various operating systems, including Ubuntu. However, if you are not using the official Docker distribution, Lando will likely fail to install.

In this article, we describe two workarounds on how to install Lando on Ubuntu.