Docfx Devcontainer

[SeanKilleen]

Hey all,

Just wanted to post here how we're using Docfx in a Devcontainer for the NUnit project in case others are interested.

We have a repo here that publishes a GitHub Action that uses Docfx: https://github.com/nunit/docfx-action. This was largely leftover from the time prior to docfx shipping as a global tool, when it was much more involved to make this work.

However, it does let us use that container within our own devcontainer: https://github.com/nunit/docs/tree/master/.devcontainer

In that folder, you'll see our Dockerfile, which is pretty minimal: https://github.com/nunit/docs/blob/master/.devcontainer/Dockerfile

We essentially:

• Pull from our dockfx actions container (which just installs docfx as a global tool on Ubuntu)
• Add node LTS, npm, yarn
• Install some of our tools (e.g. cSpell for spellchecking)
• Set up some alias commands so that we can execute common tasks quickly from the terminal inside the devcontainer.

This lets us open the devcontainer via github codespaces or VS Code on a machine with docker installed, and have all the tools we need at our disposal. Really cuts down on my workload as a maintainer of our docs.

Wanted to pass it along in case anyone else could benefit.