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layout: page title: Dev Container nav_order: 18 parent: Developer Overview

Develop Gluten in a Dev Container

Gluten ships a Dev Container configuration at .devcontainer/devcontainer.json so you can develop inside a pre-built Docker image with the Velox/Gluten native toolchain already installed. This is the fastest way to get a working Gluten build without manually installing JDK, Maven, GCC, vcpkg, and the rest of the native dependencies on your host.

What the default configuration does

The default configuration opens the workspace inside apache/gluten:vcpkg-centos-9 (static link, CentOS 9, GCC toolset 12) and runs ./dev/ci-velox-buildstatic-centos-9.sh as its postCreateCommand to perform the initial native Velox + Gluten C++ build with vcpkg. After the post-create step finishes, the container is ready for a Maven build (for example, mvn package -Pbackends-velox -DskipTests).

Prerequisites

• Docker (or any other OCI runtime supported by your editor) installed and running on the host, or a GitHub Codespaces-enabled account.
• Either:
  • Visual Studio Code with the Dev Containers extension, or
  • GitHub Codespaces (the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json is picked up automatically when you create a Codespace for the repository).

Open the workspace in a Dev Container

In VS Code:

1. Open the cloned Gluten repository.
2. Run the Dev Containers: Reopen in Container command from the Command Palette (F1).
3. Wait for the image to be pulled and the postCreateCommand to finish. The first run includes the native build and can take a while depending on your machine.

In Codespaces, just create a new Codespace for the repository -- the same flow is executed in the cloud.

Available images

The default apache/gluten:vcpkg-centos-9 is only one of several pre-built images maintained by the Gluten community. Other images are available as well -- see the full list at https://hub.docker.com/r/apache/gluten/tags.

The Dockerfiles that produce these images, and a summary of what each one is intended for (CentOS 8/9, static vs. dynamic link, different JDK versions, CUDF, etc.), are documented in Velox Backend CI.

Customize the configuration

To use a different image -- for example a dynamically linked CentOS 8 image with JDK 17 -- edit .devcontainer/devcontainer.json and update the image field, and the postCreateCommand if the toolchain provided by the new image requires a different build script:

{
    "name": "Gluten Velox Backend (centos-8-jdk17, dynamic link)",
    "image": "apache/gluten:centos-8-jdk17",
    "postCreateCommand": "./dev/builddeps-veloxbe.sh --run_setup_script=ON --enable_vcpkg=OFF --build_arrow=OFF"
}

You can also drop the postCreateCommand entirely if you prefer to run the native build manually inside the container; see Build Gluten Velox backend in docker for the full set of build flags and the trade-offs between static and dynamic linking.

Use the image without a Dev Container

The same images can be used directly with docker run if you do not want to use the Dev Containers tooling:

docker run -it --rm -v "$PWD":/workspace -w /workspace apache/gluten:vcpkg-centos-9 bash
# then, inside the container:
./dev/ci-velox-buildstatic-centos-9.sh

See Build Gluten Velox backend in docker for more involved build recipes (packaging the Gluten jar, dynamic-link builds, etc.).