The Community Dev Containers project aims to document, maintain, and improve on the official devcontainers images, features, and templates to improve the developer experience for end-users.

The Community Dev Containers project operates under principles similar to those of the OpenJS Foundation. It operates collaboratively, openly, ethically, and transparently. Project proposals, ideas, timelines, and statuses should not merely be open and available, but also easily visible to outsiders. Outside users and developers should be able to participate in discussions, ideas, issues, and make contributions with as little effort as possible.

The current official @devcontainers project's scope is limited to features, images, and templates that serve only the highest level of most popular programming environments.

For instance, the devcontainers/features repository contains only 28 different addons. The devcontainers/images repository only has a selection of 15 different development environment baselines.

This project is the centralized unofficial hub for other features, images, and templates that would not be permitted to fall under the official @devcontainers umbrella.

The @devcontainers-contrib organization maintains and evolves the images, features, templates, and documentation content for aspects not covered by the official @devcontainers organization. It provides a stable, yet flexible, set of supporting software for users who use dev containers that is governed to accomodate their desires. This project's value is its balance between administration and community adherence. It's scope includes listening and responding to user feedback.

• Docker images for ecosystems not covered an official dev containers image
• Feature collections for popular tools that are typical on developer computers
• Templates for popular project configurations and setups
• Conventions and best-practices to follow architecting a dev container
• Make it easy to propose, add, or otherwise discuss additional features, images, and templates

Tutorials and guides on how to use dev containers are not covered under the umbrella of the Community Dev Containers project. These items can be pursued by individual members, but are not endorsed or covered under this organization's scope.

• Creating a dev container feature for every single Node.js or Python package
• Maintaining a dev container image for all permutations of tooling mashups
• Fixing users' broken dev container configurations
• Answering questions about decisions made by the official @devcontainers organization