VSCode DevContainer in linux doesn't recognize Docker, or the packages installed during build

Question

I have a devcontainer set up as a work environment on Debian 13. Until recently, it was working perfectly fine, but recently I started getting error messages like this:

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Once I was already inside the devcontainer. Funny thing is, our devcontainer's image definitely installs docker to use docker-in-docker, and it installs several other things that are also missing, like mysql, mongosh, etc.

Things I've tried to solve this:

1. Built from scratch (after docker system prune -af)
2. Reinstalled VSCode
3. Reinstalled Docker
4. Reinstalled Debian 13
5. Installed and tried Podman (our container uses secrets, and other buildkit features, so this didn't work)
6. Change the "docker path" settings in VSCode to point to the absolute path rather than just "docker"

I can see docker containers just fine when I'm not within the devcontainer. If I manually install docker.io within the devcontainer's terminal it suddenly shows the containers again, but none of the other features work, and it should already have docker installed. My other colleagues (half on Windows through WSL2, half on OSX, none on native Linux) do not have this problem.

Answer 1

I discovered what the issue was! It was a problem in our dockerfile. We use Liquibase and had frozen our version at 4.28.0, which was fine until recently, because their apt repository stopped supplying it. Because our dockerfile was one huge run statement with a few supporting smaller ones, failing one bit failed the rest, and so the devcontainer did not have docker installed. Upgrading liquibase fixed this issue.