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Proposal: Add `devcontainers init` command similar to `devcontainerize`

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#890 3 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
docker, typescript

Research direction

Start by reviewing the existing CLI structure and comparing it with the devcontainerize tool and the devcontainers/images repository. Done means an official devcontainers init command detects the project type, fetches the appropriate Dockerfile and devcontainer.json, creates .devcontainer, and optionally updates .gitignore in a Git repository.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature-request

Hello devcontainers team,

I've recently created a tool called devcontainerize (https://www.npmjs.com/package/devcontainerize, https://github.com/mathdroid/devcontainerize) that automatically detects a project's type and sets up the appropriate devcontainer configuration.

The tool:

  1. Detects the project type based on files in the current directory.
  2. Fetches appropriate Dockerfile and devcontainer.json from the devcontainers/images repository.
  3. Creates a .devcontainer directory with these files.
  4. Optionally adds .devcontainer to .gitignore if in a Git repository.

I believe a similar functionality could be valuable as part of the official devcontainers CLI, potentially as a devcontainers init command.

I'm keen to contribute this functionality to the official CLI if the team is interested. This could help streamline the process of setting up devcontainers for various project types and improve the overall developer experience.

Would you be open to discussing this further? I'd be happy to provide more details about the implementation or discuss how we could adapt it to fit within the existing CLI structure.

Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
3k
Forks
461
Avg merge
18m
Merged PRs (30d)
5

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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