Ask HN: MicroVM setup for VS Code Dev Container-like experience?
4 comments
If I understand correctly, I think your usecase better fit with Lima -> https://lima-vm.io/ than microvm.
So, might worth trying it https://lima-vm.io/docs/examples/vscode/ a bit.
I've been using a similar setup, but based on Dagger. I don't have it as a proper dev container (yet), but I get a lot of the vscode benefits by presenting it as a virtual filesystem and terminal. I can make fully custom envs that myself or my agents can use, we can even share the same ones and see each others changes.
I open VS Code, I open the local folder in a dev container. The local folder gets mounted into container for persistent changes. The container dockerfile is my setup of dev dependencies. Within the container I can do whatever global installs I want that persist between sessions, and the project edits persist on host machine.
That works and I like the setup. I can run CLI codent agent in the terminal of VS Code, while still having good dev experience.
Now, I would like to have basically this flow but be MicroVM based, where the main thing I solve is allowing me to run docker inside that microvm, as docker-in-docker does not work well. Additionally if I could use secrets without them being exposed in the microvm itself, that would be amazing.
But I've spent a good amount of time checking different microvm's, and there's a few issues:
- A lot of them are designed for short ephemeral tasks, not a long running dev environment that easily persists and has separation of container persistence and host persistence
- I don't think they integrate with VS Code or other dev tools? Are you supposed to install vs code into the microVM itself, instead of having host VS Code interact with it?
- Docker released sandboxes which kinda does what I need, but it is JUST ai agents. And only the ones they support. You can't have your own custom environment where you do what you want.
So I am confused. There's tons of different solutions and none of them seem to work, all I want is to have Dev-Container like experience that is a bit more secure and can allow me to do Docker inside of it.