The Portainer development toolkit is a containerized development environment for Portainer!

Works on Linux and MacOS!

For previous versions of the toolkit that also included the VSCode IDE, see the branch 2024.08.

TLDR

Install the devcontainer extension in your IDE of choice. For more information on supported IDEs, see the devcontainer documentation.

Configure your workspace to use the devcontainer.json file in this repository.

Open your project in your IDE using the Open Folder in Container option and start coding!

Have a look at the rest of the documentation below for more configuration/customization options.

About

This toolkit is based on the Ubuntu 24.04 LTS image and comes with the following tools pre-installed:

• Golang
• Docker CLI
• NodeJS
• Yarn

See Dockerfile for more details.

Automatic builds

The portainer/dev-toolkit image is using DockerHub automatic builds to build multi-arch (amd64, arm64) images based on this git repository tags.

E.g. creating and pushing a new 2024.12 tag in this repository will automatically build portainer/dev-toolkit:2024.12.

Warning
The automatic builds are currently disabled. Reach out to @deviantony for building newer versions of the base image using manual instructions below.

Manual build

Follow the instructions below if you wish to build the image manually. Use the following command to build and push the base image (make sure you are authenticated to DockerHub first):

make base

Requirements

All you need to have installed is Docker.

The container image is distributed by Portainer via portainer/dev-toolkit, checkout DockerHub for more details on the tags/versions: https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/portainer/dev-toolkit/tags?page=1&ordering=last_updated

How to use it

Use the base image

Create a .devcontainer folder in your project and copy the devcontainer.json file that is provided in this repository inside.

Open your project in your IDE using the Open Folder in Container option and start coding! You'll be using the base image, see below for customization options.

Customize it!

Developers should be able to customize the environment to their liking (I prefer to work with zsh as a shell for example), this dev toolkit was designed to be extended.

See the examples/ and user-toolkits folders for a list of examples on how you can customize your dev toolkit.

All you will need is to build it first:

docker buildx build -t my-devkit -f examples/zsh/Dockerfile .

Then you can use the instructions above to run it, just replace the official portainer/dev-toolkit:2024.12 with your image in the devcontainer.json file:

{
	"name": "portainer-dev-toolkit",
	"image": "my-devkit",
	...
}

User toolkits

If you wish to use somebody's toolkit or share yours, have a look at the user-toolkits/ folder!

Building Portainer inside the toolkit

After opening your project in the dev container, execute the following commands to start a development build.

Install the dependencies and build the client+server first:

make build-all

Run the backend as a process directly:

./dist/portainer --data /tmp/portainer --log-level=DEBUG

Run the client in dev mode if you wish to do changes on the client:

make dev-client

References & useful links

• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/devcontainer-cli#_development-containers
• https://containers.dev/
• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/create-dev-container#_create-a-devcontainerjson-file
• https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/devcontainers/devcontainer-cli#_prebuilding
• https://containers.dev/implementors/json_reference/