devc – Reproducible Development Environments
For a quickstart guide, see Quickstart.
devc is a small CLI tool to create Dockerfiles and devcontainer.json.
It helps to setup reproducible and isolated development environments within seconds that can be shared across teams.
What it gives you
automatic Dockerfile + devcontainer generation
clean, isolated development environments
easy sharing — share the image and reuse the devcontainer.json
Quick Example (ROS 2)
Using the ROS 2 plugin, devc creates the entire environment for you:
Create a ROS 2 my_ros2_ws :
mkdir my_ros2_ws && cd my_ros2_ws
Generated ROS 2 Dockerfile :
devc dockerfile ros2-desktop-full --ros-distro rolling
Generated ROS 2 devcontainer.json with nvidia support and your ssh keys mounted:
devc dev-json ros2-desktop-full --ros-distro rolling --name "my_ros2_ws" --nvidia --ssh=mount
That’s all you need. After this you can open the folder in VSCode with: code . and press F1 → Dev Containers: Reopen in Container.
After this you are all set up with a isolated full ROS 2 development environment.
Typical Project Layout
my_ws/
├── .devcontainer/
│ └── devcontainer.json
└── .docker/
| └── Dockerfile
└── rest of your project files ...
The workspace my_ws folder is mounted inside the container. This means any code inside this folder is accessible from within the container.
CI Integration
Pipelines can prebuild the Docker image and push it to a registry.
Your devcontainer.json can reference that image directly, allowing instant
startup without rebuilding locally.
Using of a pre-build ros2 image shared with your team:
devc dev-json base-setup --image="your_registry:your_image" --name "my_ws"