Certain operations like postCreateCommand run non-interactive, non-login shells. Unfortunately, nvm is really particular that it needs to be "sourced" before it is used, which can only happen automatically with interactive and/or login shells. Fortunately, this is easy to work around:
Just can source the nvm startup script before using it:
"postCreateCommand": ". ${NVM_DIR}/nvm.sh && nvm install --lts"Note that typically the default shell in these cases is sh not bash, so use . ${NVM_DIR}/nvm.sh instead of source ${NVM_DIR}/nvm.sh.
Alternatively, you can start up an interactive shell which will in turn source nvm:
"postCreateCommand": "bash -i -c 'nvm install --lts'"Debian/Ubuntu, RedHat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, Alma, and Rocky Linux distributions with the apt, yum, dnf, or microdnf package manager installed.
Note: RedHat 7 Family (RedHat, CentOS, etc.) must use Node versions less than 18 due to its system libraries and long-term support (LTS) policies.
bash is required to execute the install.sh script.
Note
Beyond the core install, this feature also sets up a few items by default for convenience — recommended VS Code extensions (such as a linter) and supporting tools. This is intentional behavior shared across features in this repository.
Exclude a bundled VS Code extension by prefixing its ID with -, or disable a bundled tool by setting its option to none :
{
"features": {
"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/node:2": {
"pnpmVersion": "none"
}
},
"customizations": {
"vscode": {
"extensions": [ "-dbaeumer.vscode-eslint" ]
}
}
}