How to Use onCreateCommand with Root Permissions in VSCode Dev Containers

[sikso1892]

When using devcontainer in VSCode, I am facing an issue with the following scenario:

In the image, I configure the onCreateCommand to execute commands requiring root privileges, such as:

onCreateCommand: apt-get update && apt-get install {dev.packages etc. gdb ...}

However, the final user in the container is not root, but something like appuser. For this reason, I set the following configurations in devcontainer.json:

"containerUser": "root",
"remoteUser": "appuser"

Despite these settings, the commands in onCreateCommand are still executed as appuser, resulting in permission errors.

My Goal:

I want to execute the onCreateCommand as root during the container's initialization phase and then switch back to appuser afterward for development purposes.

Key Considerations:

• I do not want to use root as the final user in the container.
• Using root as the container user can cause issues, such as files created within the dev container being owned by root, which complicates file handling outside the container.

Question:

Does anyone have a good solution or best practice to achieve this? Ideally, I want the container to start as root during initialization and then automatically switch to appuser afterward. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!

[chrmarti]

You could install the packages using a Dockerfile. That has the advantage of using Docker's layer cache.

If you have to use onCreateCommand for some reason, you could use sudo by configuring it to work without password (our images come with it preconfigured this way).