Remote containers on Windows - how?

Question

I have been playing around with the Remote containers feature of VS Code. If I have a .devcontainer directory inside my repo, VS code suggests to open the repo using a bind mount.

However, bind mounting to Windows seems to have two major drawbacks:

• File permissions are all wrong. I am not sure what happens if I git commit such a file, maybe I will inadvertedly make non-executable files executable? I think this is a limitation in Docker for windows, but a problem nonetheless.
• CRLF conversion is by default introducing whitespace diffs in all files (This is solved by .gitattributes though).
• I saw that there is an option to clone the repo directly from Github to a named volume, but that does not respect the mount point set in the devcontainer.json file.

So I think my questions is really about: is remote containers at all usable on Windows for practical purposes and if so, how do I best set it up?

Answer 1

While it does work good for me in Windows 10 (2004 update), I recommend using devcontainer using WSL2 as it works "smoother".

The file permissions issue might be fixable using the remoteUser property in the devcontainer.json file. Just remove the comment and use the remoteUser value that is supplied by the template.