Dynamic dockerPath?

[vk496]

Hello and thanks for this project!

Right now, remote.containers.dockerPath is replaced directly in the settings.json. However, I would like to use the Docker of my system in order to do some development inside containers (podman have some incompatibilities). It is possible to use podman-host just for the current session and then restore old values? Or I had to manually change each time?

Btw: using grep and sed could make some problems (like, if I have duplicated that string and commented it would not detect it propery). Maybe switching to jq would make sure detection of the configuration is properly done.

Br,
Valentin

[owtaylor]

If you set remote.containers.dockerPath the settings.json for a workspace, I think that should override the user-level setting. Can you try that? (Presumably you'll need to change it to some sort of flatpak-spawn --host docker command)

It would also be possible for toolbox-vscode to do that - to edit settings at a workspace level instead of at a user level. There would be some issues if you, e.g, open another folder as a workspace from within VSCode - currently that stays within the toolbox correctly. I think it would end up in a not-working state if the dockerPath setting wasn't global to the user.

Most systems don't have jq installed, so I wouldn't want to use it in code.sh - if the current editing ends up being a problem, I'd probably look at using Python to do the editing. But loading the file as JSON and dumping it again will definitely lose any comments - if the parser even allows that - they aren't valid JSON. The grep/sed approach has the benefit of leaving whatever is in the file untouched - comments, formatting, etc.

P.S. - generally speaking my experience with Podman is that it is highly compatible. Would certainly encourage trying to stick with podman if possible rather than running multiple container runtimes on a system, duplicating pulling images, etc. Not saying that there aren't situations where using docker might be necessary - if you were running your containers via docker-compose or something. But I would start off from the assumption that podman does just work.