With the recent release (the one with features) I tried experimenting with the devcontainers CLI. But I just can't get the forwardPorts feature to work. I created the following minimal devcontainer.json file:

{

  "name": "my-project-devcontainer",

  "image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:ubuntu",

  "features": {

    "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/sshd:1": {

      "version": "latest"

    }

  },

  "forwardPorts": [2222],

  "remoteUser": "vscode"

}

Maybe I am misunderstanding the forwardPorts option, but I would expect that this configuration will forward the port 2222 (this is the default defined by the sshd feature) from the devcontainer to my host. But a simple ssh localhost -p 2222 did not work.

I tried this on Windows 11.

Port forwarding is currently not implemented in the CLI. Labelling as feature request.

Is there any information about the intent of adding Port Forwarding to the devcontainer CLI?

How are you supposed to expose ports, if the option is not supported in devcontainer.json? I have tried looking through the cli tool (most naturally would think it fits in devcontainer up), but have not found anything.

Most simply, I am looking for something equivalent to docker run -p 8080:8080 ….

Something like this feels crucial to support individuals that don’t use vscode, but would rather dev in the container with vim / emacs.

@michaelperel, to my knowledge, port forwarding is not supported in the CLI via forward-port. You can use the appPort Option. I implemented basic port forwarding via the docker -p/--publish flag. Currently, it is still living here: https://github.com/MunsMan/devcontainercli/tree/port_forwarding
I will do a pull request after I added some testing. If you like, I would love feedback.

I truly agree that the Devcontainer CLI should support workflows independent of VS Code. I'm additionally developing auto-forwarding, but it will probably be a feature, which needs to be added to an Image. We will see.

Any progress on this? Would be awesome to get this feature!

You can use the appPort Option. I implemented basic port forwarding via the docker -p/--publish flag. Currently, it is still living here: https://github.com/MunsMan/devcontainercli/tree/port_forwarding
I will do a pull request

I rebased this and made some minor modifications (simplifications and style etc) and put up a PR: #859

I'm additionally developing auto-forwarding, but it will probably be a feature, which needs to be added to an Image. We will see.

It looks like this was worked on in https://github.com/MunsMan/autoForward but was not completed?

GitHub Codespaces does have auto-forwarding, which is nice, not sure if VSCode does as well.

But while related, that's a separate feature from supporting plain forwardPorts