Access VS Code Dev Containers from your local network

There are two ways to publish ports to the host and make them available on the local network: Forwarding and publishing.

Forwarding

This is a specific VS Code concept. The idea is that forwarded ports look like localhost to the container. That makes it pretty easy to set up:

1. Change VS Code settings:

   {
     "remote.localPortHost": "allInterfaces"
   }

2. Restart your server process in the container. For Astro, for example, this would be:

   npm run dev

Publishing

This is just plain Docker:

1. Change Dev Container settings:

   {
     "appPort": ["4321"]
   }

2. Adjust the scripts in the package.json to make processes listen to all addresses. For Astro, for example, this would be:

   {
     "scripts": {
       "dev": "astro dev"
       "dev": "astro dev --host"
     }
   }

3. Rebuild Dev Container

GitHub Codespaces

GitHub Codespaces does automatic forwarding for us, without the need to configure any of the settings mentioned above.

Browser support: If you are wondering why your application preview won’t show up in Chromium: It just does not work at the moment.

The officially supported browsers are Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari.

Tags

#astro #devcontainer #docker #dx #vscode

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