Environment

Our team is using Visual Studio Code and Docker which boosts software development by providing a powerful, customizable editor and ensuring consistent environments with containerization.

VS Code's rich extensions and debugging tools integrate seamlessly with Docker, allowing developers to write, test, and debug code within containers.

This setup eliminates environment inconsistencies, accelerates development, and improves team collaboration.

Docker

Docker helps build, share, run, and verify applications anywhere — without tedious environment configuration or management. There are two main options how to setup Docker.

If you do not have previous experience with Docker, then here is good place to start:

• Docker Docs - Get Started

Engine

If your primary development system is Linux then you can install Docker daemon directly on your host, see Install for more details on how to install it in distributution you're using.

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Docker Engine is an open source containerization technology for building and containerizing your applications. Docker Engine acts as a client-server application with:

• A server with a long-running daemon process dockerd.
• APIs which specify interfaces that programs can use to talk to and instruct the Docker daemon.
• A command line interface (CLI) client docker.

The CLI uses Docker APIs to control or interact with the Docker daemon through scripting or direct CLI commands. Many other Docker applications use the underlying API and CLI. The daemon creates and manages Docker objects, such as images, containers, networks, and volumes.

For more details, see Docker Architecture.

Desktop

If you're working on macOS or Windows, you can still install Engine, but that would require managing a local Linux VM. Docker Desktop provides a convenient solution and handles the required virtualization for you:

• Install on Mac
• Install on Windows

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Docker Desktop is a one-click-install application for your Mac, Linux, or Windows environment that lets you build, share, and run containerized applications and microservices.

Visual Studio Code

VS Code available for macOS, Linux, and Windows, has extensible architecture and has rich customization and integration options. Here is good place to get familiar with it:

• Setting up Visual Studio Code

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Visual Studio Code combines the simplicity of a source code editor with powerful developer tooling, like IntelliSense code completion and debugging.

First and foremost, it is an editor that gets out of your way. The delightfully frictionless edit-build-debug cycle means less time fiddling with your environment, and more time executing on your ideas.

Dev Containers

VS Code also provides seamless integration with Docker for managing environments by supporting Dev Containers specification.

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The Visual Studio Code Dev Containers extension lets you use a container as a full-featured development environment. It allows you to open any folder inside (or mounted into) a container and take advantage of Visual Studio Code's full feature set. A devcontainer.json file in your project tells VS Code how to access (or create) a development container with a well-defined tool and runtime stack. This container can be used to run an application or to separate tools, libraries, or runtimes needed for working with a codebase.

Following docs section provides good overview of available features:

• Developing inside a Container