Skip creation of ./.github/dependabot.yml by default

[ndlarsen]

Currently when creating a dev container, a ./.github/dependabot.yml is added. Looking through the extension's settings I have found no obvious way to prevent this. I suggest this is configurable and disabled by default.

[chrmarti]

This is added by the templates. I wonder if we should have a setting to skip all files in .github.

[chrmarti]

Or we could add it as an option in the UI when adding the configuration.

[ndlarsen]

Thank you for acknowledging this.

This is added by the templates. I wonder if we should have a setting to skip all files in .github.

The need for ./.github is situational, so this is in my opinion worth considering.

Or we could add it as an option in the UI when adding the configuration.

Having this as an option in the drop down menu when creating a new dev container via the GUI could probably be nice in addition to

• being able to disable it via the .devcontainer/devcontainer.json.
• having a way to disable it when using a pre-existing dev container as base

[joshspicer]

I think it would be nice to generalize this behavior beyond .github. We could add an optionalPaths property (or similar) to the Template's devcontainer-template.json manifest file.

{
    "id": "cpp",
    "version": "3.0.0",
    "name": "C++",
    "description": "Develop C++ applications",
    "optionalPaths": [
         ".github/*"
     ]
}

With that information the Dev Containers extension could then prompt the user with whether or not they want to include those path(s) when applying the template.

I could see this useful not only for platform-specific files (like .github), but perhaps also for example/boilerplate code:

{
    "id": "cpp",
    "version": "3.0.0",
    "name": "C++",
    "description": "Develop C++ applications",
    "optionalPaths": [
         ".example-project/*",
         "MyProject.csproj",
         ...
     ]
}

We'd then update all our devcontainers/templates with .github being optional.

Thoughts?

Edit: Formal spec proposal for commenting devcontainers/spec#484

[joshspicer]

Related to devcontainers/templates#274

[joshspicer]

Will keep this open until we publish a pre-release of the dev containers extension (set to release by the end of this milestone 😄 )

(Interested Template authors can get their Templates ready by following this example and associated spec link: devcontainers/templates#278)

[joshspicer]

Support for Templates that declare optionalPaths has shipped in the Dev Containers extension pre-release v0.382.0.

I've re-published all the Templates in the devcontainers/templates repo to declare .github as optional.

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