Updated Tuesday, August 9th, 2022

Devcontainers for frontend development

Frontend

Introduction

There is a VSCode extension by Microsoft called “Remote - Containers” which allows development inside of Docker containers, with configuration managed as code (within a devcontainer.json file).

This has some nice features, namely:

The version of node and other global tools (like PNPM) are managed by the Dockerfile in the repo, developers don’t need to manually manage it on their host machine.
The node_modules is stored within a Docker volume, not on the host operating system. This can improve the speed of installs/builds particularly if the host operating system is Windows (cause of AV scanning, slow file system, etc.)

Experiment with a Next.js App

Create a new Next.js app with typescript
Install the Remote Containers VSCode extension
Create the config files:

// For format details, see https://aka.ms/devcontainer.json. For config options, see the README at:
// https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/tree/v0.241.1/containers/docker-existing-dockerfile
{
  "name": "My Next.js App",
 
  "context": "..",
 
  "customizations": {
    "vscode": {
      "settings": {
        "editor.defaultFormatter": "esbenp.prettier-vscode"
      },
      "extensions": ["mutantdino.resourcemonitor", "esbenp.prettier-vscode"]
    }
  },
 
  "dockerFile": "../Dockerfile",
  "mounts": [
    "source=my-next-app-node_modules,target=${containerWorkspaceFolder}/node_modules,type=volume"
  ],
 
  // Use 'forwardPorts' to make a list of ports inside the container available locally.
  "forwardPorts": [3000],
 
  "postCreateCommand": "pnpm install"
}

.devcontainer/devcontainer.json

FROM node:latest

RUN npm i -g pnpm

Dockerfile

/** @type {import('next').NextConfig} */
const nextConfig = {
  reactStrictMode: true,
  swcMinify: true,
  webpack: (config) => {
    // Workaround for Next not detecting changes within a container
    config.watchOptions = {
      aggregateTimeout: 200,
      poll: 1000,
    };
 
    return config;
  },
};
 
module.exports = nextConfig;

next.config.js

Open the folder in VSCode, check bottom lefthand corner to check if the devcontainer starts up

Resources

Developing inside a Container - VSCode docs
Remote Containers - VSCode Extension
devcontainer.json reference
Improve disk performance - VSCode docs
- Contains tutorial for setting up node_modules folder to stored inside a docker volume