Devcontainer fails to build on Apple Silicon (arm64) due to trixie base image

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
91/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
docker, dockerfile, javascript
Domain
devops

Research direction

Open .devcontainer/Dockerfile and inspect the base-image declaration and apt-get install step. Build the devcontainer for linux/arm64 and confirm the dependency installation completes without the reported package errors.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

The devcontainer fails to build on Apple Silicon Macs. The base image mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/javascript-node:22 resolves to Debian 13 (trixie) on arm64, where python3-distutils and software-properties-common are unavailable, causing the apt-get install step to fail.

Verified with:

$ docker run --rm --platform linux/arm64 \
    mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/javascript-node:22 \
    cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)"

Error:

E: Unable to locate package software-properties-common
E: Package 'python3-distutils' has no installation candidate

Fix: Pin the base image in .devcontainer/Dockerfile to the bookworm variant:

FROM mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/javascript-node:22-bookworm

This is a one-line change that makes the devcontainer build correctly on arm64.

Dominant language
C++
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
2d 12h
Merged PRs (30d)
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