Developing in a development container
This page will help you get a development container set up on your local machine.
- These instructions assume you're NOT familiar with git or development containers. If you are, feel free to skip these instructions, clone the repository and fire up its development container using your preferred method.
- Never heard of a development container? Short version: It's like an invisible virtual machine that has everything you need already installed (correct versions of Python, R, Jupyter, etc.) so you don't have to configure all that stuff on your own machine. Your development tools talk to that container behind the scenes.
- Don't want to use a development container? (E.g., maybe you've already got all the necessary software on your computer and don't want to learn the machinery of dev containers right now.) See [Developing using your own tools].
⚠️ Warning: Some software libraries used in some solutions have not yet been updated to work on ARM architecture, so if you're using a machine with ARM-based architecture (most recent Macs and some of the newest Surfaces) the following procedure will not work for you. I look forward to removing this warning when all relevant software libraries have caught up to have ARM support. Until then, use the method in the previous bullet point.
- Follow Microsoft's tutorial to install Visual Studio Code (aka VS Code) and its Dev Containers extension. You don't have to do that whole tutorial, only up to and including the section entitled "Check Installation." (No need to go on to the section entitled "Get the sample.")
- I highly recommend installing GitHub Desktop to make it easy to fetch our code, view your changes, and submit "pull requests," which are covered elsewhere in this wiki. (If you're a git pro, you can skip this step.)
- Download our code by visiting the main folder of our code repository and using the buttons there to open the code repository on your computer using GitHub Desktop. See the screenshot below for what to click, plus you will need to permit your browser to open GitHub Desktop, and choose a folder in which to store the downloaded code.
- Open VS Code, choose the "Open Folder..." command, and tell it to open the folder into which you just downloaded the code.
- VS Code will then tell you that there is a development container definition in that folder and ask if you want to build the container. Say yes. Building the container will take a long time (maybe 10 minutes or more), and that doesn't mean anything is wrong. You can click the progress indicator in the bottom right of the VS Code window if you want to see the details of the building process.