How to install devcontainers CLI in a Container?

[MarkusEicher]

Hello devcontainer people. I am totally new to this matter and tried to find a way to install and use the devcontainers CLI in a container instead of having to install it on my Debian WSL2 instance. Not that this won't work, but I was not able to find a way to have access to the CLI from a bash outside of the container. Maybe easy peasy stuff for a pro, but I could not find a way. Any help appreciated.

[chrmarti]

The CLI is currently available as a NPM package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@devcontainers/cli. You can install that after installing Node.js in your container: npm install -g @devcontainers/cli.

The Dev Containers CLI needs access to the Docker daemon. So you could either run Docker nested inside of the dev container or you could mount the host Docker daemon's socket in the container (the preferred choice depends on what you want to do). There are two features helping with this, add one of them to your devcontainer.json under "features":

• "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/docker-in-docker:2": {} (nested Docker)
• "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/docker-outside-of-docker:1": {} (host's Docker)

[MarkusEicher]

Many thanks. I appreciate your support. Gonna try this out and will gladly mark this as the answer if it works.