Automatically selecting dev.containers.dockerSocketPath based on remote context

[Aurorabili]

Description

Docker-in-Docker requires dev.containers.dockerSocketPath to pass the socket to the container. However, different remote contexts have different socket paths. Is there a way to automatically select the appropriate value for dev.containers.dockerSocketPath based on the current context?

Motivation

I use development containers to work by connecting to a remote socket via a remote context. Recently, I have been gradually switching to using Podman rootless instead of Docker. Podman rootless has a different default socket path, usually $XDG_RUNTIME_DIR/podman/podman.sock. Every time I switch between remote contexts with different socket paths, I have to manually change dev.containers.dockerSocketPath. For example, I currently have the following remote contexts:

NAME	ENDPOINT	DOCKER SOCKET PATH
desktop-linux (WSL2)	npipe:////./pipe/dockerDesktopLinuxEngine	/var/run/docker.sock
docker remote	ssh://host3	/var/run/docker.sock
podman-rootless	ssh://host1/run/user/1001/podman/podman.sock	/run/user/1001/podman/podman.sock
podman-rootful	ssh://host2/run/podman/podman.sock	/var/run/docker.sock -> /run/podman/podman.sock

Discussion

In #10005, there was a discussion about whether the socket path could be retrieved from podman context inspect. Unfortunately, podman context inspect still does not return any content. This might be because podman context is a link to podman system connection (containers/podman#12811), and the latter does not implement a JSON-formatted inspect command, so it is not supported.

In fact, as mentioned in #10005, directly setting /run/user/$(id -u)/podman/podman.socket as the value for dev.containers.dockerSocketPath results in a "socket not found" error because it is passed as a string to Podman instead of being resolved to $(id -u).

Related

#10706

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This is a great project, and I look forward to better integration with Podman. Thanks to everyone involved!

[vs-code-engineering]

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Happy Coding!