NOTES.md

OS Support

This Feature should work on recent versions of Debian/Ubuntu-based distributions with the apt package manager installed.

bash is required to execute the install.sh script.

Authentication

If you set the authOnSetup option, the feature installs a one-time shell startup hook script. When gh auth status shows you are not already authenticated, the hook first tries gh auth login --with-token if GH_TOKEN or GITHUB_TOKEN is available in the environment, otherwise it falls back to gh auth login in an interactive shell. This happens after the dev container starts, so it can use values injected through runtime environment settings like remoteEnv.

Example:

{
	"features": {
		"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/github-cli:1": {
			"authOnSetup": true,
			"extensions": "dlvhdr/gh-dash,github/gh-copilot"
		}
	},
	"remoteEnv": {
		"GITHUB_TOKEN": "${localEnv:GITHUB_TOKEN}"
	}
}

If you already authenticate on the host with GitHub CLI, export a token before opening the dev container:

export GITHUB_TOKEN="$(gh auth token)"

Then the remoteEnv example above will pass that token into the container's post-start auth flow.

Extensions

If you set the extensions option, the feature requires either authOnSetup=true or installExtensionsFromGit=true. The unsupported combination authOnSetup=false and installExtensionsFromGit=false fails during feature setup with a clear error.

When authOnSetup=true, extension installation is deferred until that post-start auth flow runs so runtime tokens can be used for authenticated installs, unless installExtensionsFromGit=true. Extensions are installed for the most appropriate non-root user (based on USERNAME / _REMOTE_USER), with a fallback to root.

Set installExtensionsFromGit to true if you want to skip gh extension install and always clone extension repositories directly. In that mode, extensions install during feature setup even when authOnSetup is enabled.