This is not a well-thought out post but rather a reactionary post to a(n admittedly) minor frustration. While my main frustration with devcontainers is how tightly coupled they are to VS Code (and let’s stop pretending they are not: you can’t forwardPort in the devcontainer-cli,[1] unless you want to run neovim inside the devcontainer (a headache) you can’t use nice things like neotest, etc.), my current frustration is that, if you have a devcontainer, maybe you want to use it to run your CI tests, sure.

But this makes failures so fucking annoying to troubleshoot.

Because instead of a helpful message along the lines of:

FAILED tests/test_error_pages.py::test_404_shows_custom_template

You get fucking this:

Dev container exec failed: (exit code: 4)

And while yes, an exit code is a start, if you’re using the devcontainers/ci@v0.3 GitHub action, you have to dig through lots of bullshit logging messages under a drop down to see which, if any, tests failed, or if there was an issue in the actual setup of devcontainer itself.

I’d rather not use them, but my team/org likes them, and I appreciate that they do greatly simply a lot of things, and that when they work, they "just work," but I kind of hate being a second-class citizen about them, not using VS Code. And really I just want to see my fucking failing CI tests without having to go digging. I know, I know: this really is just too much to ask.

1. Though it actually looks like this feature may be coming sooner than I expected, and if that’s the case, maybe I will try them again…​ but…​