About rebuilding a container
When you work in a codespace, your development environment is a Docker container that runs on a virtual machine. If you make changes to your dev container configuration from within a codespace, and you want to apply those changes to the current codespace, you need to rebuild the container.
By default, when you rebuild a container, GitHub Codespaces will speed up the build process by reusing cached images from previous builds of the container. This is usually the quickest way to implement changes to your dev container configuration, for the following reasons.
- GitHub Codespaces can reuse images in your cache rather than repulling them from container registries.
- The parts of your dev container configuration that define how the container is built, such as dev container features and Dockerfile instructions, may have already been implemented in image layers in your cache, so you won't need to wait for these processes to run again. (However, commands in your configuration that run after the container is built, such as
onCreateCommand, will run again.)
Occasionally, you may want to perform a full rebuild of your container. With a full rebuild, GitHub Codespaces cleans all Docker containers, images, and volumes from the cache, then rebuilds your container with newly pulled images. All the setup defined in your configuration will run again, generating new image layers. You may want to perform a full rebuild after many iterations of rebuilding your container with cached images, in situations such as the following.
- You want to ensure that the setup defined in your configuration is not dependent on cached images, and will run as required when someone creates a new codespace based on the configuration. For example, a dependency may have been removed from the base image since it was last pulled into your codespace.
- You want to free up the disk space used by your cache, for example if you are low on disk space or want to minimize storage charges. Your image cache might be using a significant amount of disk space if you've changed your base image multiple times, if you've made a large number of iterative changes to your configuration, or if you're running multiple containers with Docker Compose.
Performing a full rebuild
You can perform a full rebuild in Visual Studio Code.
-
Access the VS Code Command Palette with Shift+Command+P (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows/Linux).
-
Start typing "Rebuild" and select Codespaces: Full Rebuild Container.
Persisting data over a full rebuild
Any files and folders contained in the /workspaces directory of your codespace are always persisted over a rebuild. You do not need to change any settings or add any configuration to retain the contents of this directory over a full rebuild.
If you want to preserve files outside the /workspaces directory over a full rebuild, you can create, at the desired location in the container, a symbolic link (symlink) to the persistent directory. For example, in your /workspaces/.devcontainer directory, you can create a config directory that will be preserved across a rebuild. You can then symlink the config directory and its contents as a postCreateCommand in your devcontainer.json file.
{
"image": "mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/base:alpine",
"postCreateCommand": ".devcontainer/postCreate.sh"
}
In the example postCreate.sh file below, the contents of the config directory are symbolically linked to the home directory.
#!/bin/bash
ln -sf $PWD/.devcontainer/config $HOME/config && set +x