Create Devcontainer config

[garrettw]

As requested by @TimWolla.

[garrettw]

@TimWolla it's all ready for you now

[Girgias]

I don't know anything about containerization and don't have any strong opinions about this.

[TimWolla]

Thank you. I've tried spawning a codespace from your repository, connected to it via VS Code and ran make php. It failed with:

if [ -n "devcontainer" ] && [ "devcontainer" = "devcontainer" ]; then \
        .devcontainer/configure-apache.sh "/workspaces/php-doc-en/output/php-web"; \
fi
Apache web root directory set to /workspaces/php-doc-en/output/php-web
AH00558: apache2: Could not reliably determine the server's fully qualified domain name, using 127.0.0.1. Set the 'ServerName' directive globally to suppress this message
(13)Permission denied: AH00072: make_sock: could not bind to address [::]:80
(13)Permission denied: AH00072: make_sock: could not bind to address 0.0.0.0:80
no listening sockets available, shutting down
AH00015: Unable to open logs
Action 'start' failed.
The Apache error log may have more information.
make: *** [Makefile:29: php] Error 1

It appears the post-create.sh was not properly executed? Do you have any idea of what I did wrong?

Also, I think it would be nice to avoid the additional layer of Docker within a Codespace / dev container. Would it perhaps work to directly install Java + PHP in the Codespace at creation time?

[garrettw]

I'm sure I can find a way to avoid the extra Docker layer. No idea on the other problem though - it's not happening on my end with a fresh Codespace.

[cweiske]

Do I see correctly that devcontainer.json is specific to Visual Studio Code and no other IDEs?

Why is a devcontainer with a web server needed at all, when the Makefile already uses a container to build/render the manual?

[garrettw]

@cweiske The Devcontainer spec is not specific to VS Code, though it was probably implemented there first as it's a Microsoft invention. PhpStorm supports it as well, but more importantly, GitHub Codespaces can use it to spawn a pre-customized browser-based dev environment based on VS Code.

Sorry I've let this languish; life priorities got in the way and it slipped my mind.

[jordikroon]

Thank you for proposing this idea @garrettw, and I am sorry this went stale for so long.

I support this, in fact Is support any initiative that helps newcomers to get started more easily. And I believe this solutions also everyone to more quickly peek at new changes that are packed in a PR.

It took me a while (as seen above) to feel satisfied with the setup. The original setup was using docker-in-docker, which didn't feel right to me as all the tools should already be available in devcontainer.

The new setup is using PHP built-in webserver directly, built on Trixie which is the latest version of Debian. And does have PHP 8.4 included. Launch scripts are available to quickly build without the need to really understand the build process. Similar to how make helps for docker users.

After getting an initial version working, I noticed it was.. slow. Which is why I got side tracked to fix php/doc-base#300. Which not only improved the dev container, but also give a huge improvement to using regular builds.

[TimWolla]

Did a superficial review, but didn't see any obvious issues. Given the number of commits, I trust that you tested this. Thank you!

[garrettw]

@jordikroon Awesome! Thank you so much for picking up the torch and getting this over the finish line!