Was there a change in ${PATH} expansion within containerEnv?

[iRonin]

tl;dr
Finally I've found the issue: for some reason ${PATH} in containerEnv isn't expanging anymore.
I have had it for quite some time in there, if not from the beginning of working with these devcontainers and suddenly it stopped working.

---

I've been happy devcontainer user but suddenly I cannot start them and there were no modifications to my setup - the new images fail with sleep, bash or even sh not found.

I've been looking into devcontainers generated docker compose command and or the generated files - it's straightforward but I can't figure out what image is used by devcontainers as its base...

My Dockerfile is wrapped with ARG _DEV_CONTAINERS_BASE_IMAGE=placeholder and then

FROM $_DEV_CONTAINERS_BASE_IMAGE AS dev_containers_feature_content_normalize
USER root
COPY --from=dev_containers_feature_content_source devcontainer-features.builtin.env /tmp/build-features/
RUN chmod -R 0755 /tmp/build-features/

FROM $_DEV_CONTAINERS_BASE_IMAGE AS dev_containers_target_stage

USER root

RUN mkdir -p /tmp/dev-container-features
COPY --from=dev_containers_feature_content_normalize /tmp/build-features/ /tmp/dev-container-features

RUN \
echo "_CONTAINER_USER_HOME=$( (command -v getent >/dev/null 2>&1 && getent passwd 'root' || grep -E '^root|^[^:]*:[^:]*:root:' /etc/passwd || true) | cut -d: -f6)" >> /tmp/dev-container-features/devcontainer-features.builtin.env && \
echo "_REMOTE_USER_HOME=$( (command -v getent >/dev/null 2>&1 && getent passwd 'vscode' || grep -E '^vscode|^[^:]*:[^:]*:vscode:' /etc/passwd || true) | cut -d: -f6)" >> /tmp/dev-container-features/devcontainer-features.builtin.env
....

Somewhere somehow the baseimage is so thin it does not contain anything or maybe the entrypoint is overwritten or something…

I can run the Dockerfile, compose.yml just fine with Docker and connect to it, without Devcontainers benefits...

The CLI fails with:

Error response from daemon: container 4fc8e3648de581ead3e4bb2a07978f95de19ebc29ffdec5e323e70a88ad5a8d7 is not running

Error: An error occurred setting up the container.
    at u6 (/opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@devcontainers/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js:412:3947)
    at process.processTicksAndRejections (node:internal/process/task_queues:105:5)
    at async H6 (/opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@devcontainers/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js:484:4015)
    at async BC (/opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@devcontainers/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js:484:4957)
    at async d7 (/opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@devcontainers/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js:665:202)
    at async f7 (/opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@devcontainers/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js:664:14804)
    at async /opt/homebrew/lib/node_modules/@devcontainers/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js:484:1188
{"outcome":"error","message":"An error occurred setting up the container.","description":"An error occurred setting up the container.","containerId":"4fc8e3648de581ead3e4bb2a07978f95de19ebc29ffdec5e323e70a88ad5a8d7"}

And Docker image log will be something like:

2025-07-03 14:12:42   Container started
2025-07-03 14:12:42   -: 4: exec: bash: not found

[iRonin]

Finally I've found the issue: for some reason ${PATH} in containerEnv isn't expanging anymore.
I have had it for quite some time in there, if not from the beginning of working with these devcontainers and suddenly it stopped working.