I am finally getting around to setting up a semi-production, private code-server instance for myself on one of my home-lab Linux servers, with an NVIDIA GPU. One of the issues I foresee is that my dependencies will get "reset" every time a new version of the container is deployed. Every week or two, I run docker compose pull && docker compose up --detach, to ensure I have the latest container images for my applications. If a new version of code-server comes out, my installed tools like Rust, PowerShell, NVIDIA tools, etc. will be gone.

I understand that the general approach is to build a custom Dockerfile.

However ....

💡 Question: Rather than building my own Dockerfile for code-server, is there a way for me to launch a persisted script (mapped into container by Docker volume) upon launching a new code-server container? I would rather run a script to install all my dependencies (eg. Rust Toolchain, PowerShell, NVIDIA utilities, etc.) than creating a Dockerfile. I generally prefer to use "stock" container images, rather than building my own, and then just inject whatever I need to at container runtime.

I am using Docker Compose to add code-server to the list of other pre-packaged application containers I am running. I'm sharing the snippet below for docker-compose.yaml, just in case anyone else is searching for it. I couldn't find it in the docs and created it myself.

  vscode:
    image: codercom/code-server:latest
    ports:
    - 10400:8080
    volumes:
    - ./code-server/.local:/home/coder/.local
    - ./code-server/.config:/home/coder/.config
    - ./code-server/project:/home/coder/project
    environment:
    - DOCKER_USER=${USER}
    user: 1000:1000
    restart: always