Ability to disable automatic start of Docker

[npalmius]

The following was added in the March 2024 (version 1.88) VS Code release:

Automatic start of Docker

When the Dev Containers extension detects that Docker is not running on Windows or Mac, it now checks for and automatically starts Docker Desktop. This should avoid a common manual step after rebooting your machine.

I often use multiple VS Code instances - some using dev containers, some not.

Docker can be very resource intensive (especially because I have some large docker compose projects that start automatically when Docker starts), so sometimes I just want to open VS Code without Docker running so that I can use the VS Code instances that aren't using dev containers. The ones that need dev containers fail to load, but that's ok for me as I just need to start Docker then reload the window if I want to use them (this way I can also let the docker compose projects start before starting the dev container(s) that I want). It also means that I can load just the specific dev container(s) that I need for whatever I'm doing - I may have had other dev containers open when I last exited VS Code that I don't want to load.

However, after this update Docker automatically starts when starting VS Code. This starts some large docker compose projects, and then loads all the dev containers that I happened to have open when I last exited VS Code. If I'm not plugged in, this is particularly undesirable.

So it would be great to have an option to disable the automatic start of Docker. I have looked through the Dev Containers settings and couldn't find anything - apologies if I missed it.

[devdiogenes]

It often happen to me, when I open vscode after closing in a docker project. The vscode tries to open inside container, and start it even if I don't want to use

[vs-code-engineering]

This feature request is now a candidate for our backlog. The community has 60 days to upvote the issue. If it receives 10 upvotes we will move it to our backlog. If not, we will close it. To learn more about how we handle feature requests, please see our documentation.

Happy Coding!

[joshspicer]

Looking into adding a setting for the work that was done here: #9687

[joshspicer]

This shipped in v0.382.0 (pre-release) with a new setting. Please let us know if the change helps!