Add zsh plugins to common-utils feature

[gund]

Hi, I'm exploring dev containers and so far loving them!

I'm using common-utils feature as part of my dev container setup and wondering what is the proper way of adding a few ZSH plugins to it?

I've checked the docs of common-utils feature but it does not have an option to specify list of plugins.

Any ideas?

[bamurtaugh]

Hi @gund, thanks for opening, and we're so happy to hear you're loving dev containers!

There's currently discussion over potentially splitting up the common feature: https://github.com/devcontainers/features/issues/67. So at this time, there aren't plans to add more to it.

You could certainly add zsh to your dev container through a separate Feature or install step. Depending on your setup, if you're using a specific editor like VS Code, there's a vscode.extensions property in devcontainer.json where you can specify extensions to install.

[gund]

Hey @bamurtaugh thanks for letting me know about the plans for the common feature.

Actually I already created a custom feature that allows to configure (oh-my-)zsh plugins from a devcointainer.json, so maybe I could contribute it to the zsh feature that you are going to split from the common feature?

Regarding vscode.extensions property I'm not quite sure how this would help as those are VSCode extensions but I need a way to extend actual devcontainer image to install more zsh plugins, or am I missing something?

[bamurtaugh]

Thanks for the response @gund!

Super exciting you created a custom Feature! We have an index of community-created Features and Templates, and I think a great next step would be opening a PR to add your Feature: https://github.com/devcontainers/devcontainers.github.io/blob/gh-pages/_data/collection-index.yml. This list backs the index on our spec site https://containers.dev/features.

Regarding vscode.extensions property I'm not quite sure how this would help as those are VSCode extensions but I need a way to extend actual devcontainer image to install more zsh plugins

I wasn't sure which plugins exactly you were looking to add - sometimes folks refer to VS Code extensions as plugins 😄. No need to worry about this property if these aren't extensions!

[gund]

Thanks for the guidance!

I figured that creating a brand new repo would be probably too much for my feature so I actually created a PR to devcontainer-contrib repo and since it's already added to the collection you mentioned above, my feature should be automatically discoverable I guess 😊

I think we can resolve this issue.

Thanks for your help!