Is there a way for remoteUser to re-use an existing user, but rename it?

[larsnystrom]

I work in a corporate environment, where the IT department have given me a username which is used across all hosts I manage. I'd like to use this username inside the devcontainer, but without committing it because I want my colleagues to be able to use the same devcontainer configuration. Re-using my corporate username helps when SSH:ing to other hosts, etc.

What I've been doing is to add "remoteUser": "${localEnv:USER}" to devcontainer.json. This has been working fine, as the user is created if it doesn't exist. However, I've recently hit a situation where I need the user to exist in the Dockerfile so that I can install some things in the user-directory while creating the image. So what I've done now is I add RUN adduser code to my Dockerfile to create a code user, then I install what I need for it, and finally I want to rename the code user to my corporate username.

The problem is that I can't figure out how to rename the user from the devcontainer.json file. Using remoteUser will just create a new user.

Is there some option to re-use an already existing user in the image and rename it?

Basically I want remoteUser but with an additional renameUser option, which should take the username of a user which must exist in the image and which should be renamed to the username of remoteUser.

I've kind of solved this for now by adding the build arg "LOCAL_USERNAME": "${localEnv:USER}" and the following to the end of my Dockerfile:

USER root
ARG LOCAL_USERNAME=code
RUN if [ "$LOCAL_USERNAME" != "code" ]; then usermod -l $LOCAL_USERNAME code; groupmod -n $LOCAL_USERNAME code; fi

USER $LOCAL_USERNAME

However, I think a built in way to do this would be helpful.

[samruddhikhandale]

Hi 👋

Your approach using build arguments and conditional user modification in the Dockerfile is a good workaround. However, as of now, there isn't a built-in way in devcontainer.json to rename an existing user directly.

Feel free to reopen an issue in https://github.com/devcontainers/spec and we can start working on it once we receive similar user interest. Thanks!