An Ubuntu 24.04 workspace with the Rust toolchain, Bun, Java, Python and librdkafka, plus a Postgres instance for the tests that need one.

VS Code and any other editor that supports the Dev Containers specification read devcontainer.json and start everything on their own. The rest of this file covers driving the same containers by hand with podman.

Give the podman machine enough memory first. The Rust builds link large debug binaries with one codegen/link job per CPU, so the default 2 GiB gets the linker killed by the OOM killer.

podman machine stop
podman machine set --memory 32768 --cpus 8
podman machine start

podman compose delegates to an external provider, so install one. Prefer podman-compose, which names containers <project>_<service>_<index> and therefore produces devcontainer_workspace_1.

brew install podman-compose        # or your platform's package manager

Start the three services from the repository root. Pass both compose files, as devcontainer.json does, so that the services of deploy/docker-compose.yml join the same project and network and can be started alongside the workspace later. The workspace environment points REDPANDA_BROKERS at the host redpanda, which only resolves once that service runs; see the Redpanda note below.

podman-compose -p devcontainer \
    -f .devcontainer/docker-compose.devcontainer.yml -f deploy/docker-compose.yml \
    up -d workspace postgres-dev db-admin

podman-compose ignores the postCreateCommand of devcontainer.json, so run the provisioning script yourself. It installs librdkafka, which the Kafka connectors link against, and the Playwright browsers used by the web console tests. Re-run it after every up --force-recreate.

podman exec --user user devcontainer_workspace_1 \
    bash /workspaces/feldera/.devcontainer/postCreate.sh

Then open a shell. The repository is bind-mounted at /workspaces/feldera, so edits on the host appear immediately in the container.

podman exec -it --user user devcontainer_workspace_1 bash

Tear the stack down with podman-compose -p devcontainer -f .devcontainer/docker-compose.devcontainer.yml -f deploy/docker-compose.yml down.

• The dev container takes its Rust version from the RUST_VERSION build argument in Dockerfile. That argument governs this container only. A version bump also has to reach Cargo.toml (rust-version), .pre-commit-config.yaml, deploy/Dockerfile and deploy/build.Dockerfile, or local builds drift from the pre-commit hook and the release images.

• docker compose works too, but it names the container devcontainer-workspace-1 with hyphens.

• Rust links with mold, configured in ~/.cargo/config.toml inside the image. It applies to the workspace and to the crates the manager compiles per pipeline. To compare against GNU ld, run cargo build with -C link-arg=-fuse-ld=bfd instead.

• The Kafka connector tests need Redpanda, which sits behind the redpanda profile in deploy/docker-compose.yml and stays off otherwise. --profile is a global option, so it goes before the subcommand:

  podman-compose -p devcontainer --profile redpanda \
      -f .devcontainer/docker-compose.devcontainer.yml -f deploy/docker-compose.yml \
      up -d redpanda

• The prometheus and grafana profiles do not work from this invocation. They mount ./config/..., which Compose resolves against the directory of the first -f file, so the paths land in .devcontainer/config/ instead of deploy/config/. Start those two from deploy/docker-compose.yml on its own.

• SELinux is handled in the compose file, which sets label=disable on the workspace service. Without it an enforcing host denies the container access to the bind-mounted repository.