Same here since I have replaced microsoft dev containers by anysphere dezv containers… And I can’t install back ms dev containers… It always only show me anysphere
FYI I have abandoned Cursor for my team project and switched to Copilot. Cursor has too many things going on right now. I’ll wait for couple months for them get more stable.
Hi @MattWang, thank you for sharing this issue. Which remote WSL extension are you using? If you’re on the VSCode WSL extension inside Cursor, could you try switching to the Anysphere Remote WSL?
Our remote containers extension is not compatible with the VSCode WSL extension. From these logs, it looks like the files might not have copied over as expected.
Thanks for replying. I was using Anywhere WSL as well.
For security reason my team is unable to use open vsix anymore but I’m very happy to try Cursor again with my side projects in the future.
I was also experiencing this issue, but I was able to (mostly) resolve it. Here is my case. I replaced the Microsoft extensions with Anysphere, and had issues starting my containers.
2025-07-20 17:30:42.561 [info] Searching for devcontainer.json files
2025-07-20 17:30:42.582 [info] Found 1 devcontainer.json files: \home\ubuntu\redacted\.devcontainer\devcontainer.json
2025-07-20 17:30:42.582 [info] Reading devcontainer config with command: read-configuration --workspace-folder /home/ubuntu/redacted --config /home/ubuntu/redacted/.devcontainer/devcontainer.json
2025-07-20 17:30:42.583 [error] Failed to read devcontainer config Devcontainer CLI not found at /tmp/devcontainer-cli-d2f16602-0e8f-4303-a8d5-bcc6439f782b/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js: EntryNotFound (FileSystemError): /tmp/devcontainer-cli-d2f16602-0e8f-4303-a8d5-bcc6439f782b/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js
2025-07-20 17:30:42.583 [error] Failed to reopen folder in container Failed to read devcontainer configuration
Looking at the directory, I saw it was empty, but the folder was being created:
I began to dig, and the Anysphere WSL extension output had my answer. The files were being copied to the wrong distribution. I have multiple WSL distributions, and I was working in my Ubuntu 24.04 one at the time. But I saw this:
2025-07-20 17:30:41.272 [info] [remoteFileSystem][write] path: /tmp/devcontainer-cli-d2f16602-0e8f-4303-a8d5-bcc6439f782b/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js.LICENSE.txt
2025-07-20 17:30:41.304 [info] [remoteFileSystem][write] path: /tmp/devcontainer-cli-d2f16602-0e8f-4303-a8d5-bcc6439f782b/cli/dist/spec-node/devContainersSpecCLI.js
2025-07-20 17:30:41.513 [info] [remoteFileSystem][write] converted to windows path: \\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu-22.04\tmp\devcontainer-cli-d2f16602-0e8f-4303-a8d5-bcc6439f782b\cli\scripts\updateUID.Dockerfile
2025-07-20 17:30:41.551 [info] [remoteFileSystem][write] converted to windows path: \\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu-22.04\tmp\devcontainer-cli-d2f16602-0e8f-4303-a8d5-bcc6439f782b\cli\dist\spec-node\devContainersSpecCLI.js.LICENSE.txt
2025-07-20 17:30:41.569 [info] [remoteFileSystem][write] converted to windows path: \\wsl.localhost\Ubuntu-22.04\tmp\devcontainer-cli-d2f16602-0e8f-4303-a8d5-bcc6439f782b\cli\dist\spec-node\devContainersSpecCLI.js
I am not running in the Ubuntu 22.04 distribution. When running wsl --list, I saw that the Ubuntu 22.04 distro was set to default. It seems that the WSL extension is latching onto the default WSL distro, and not the one I was in.
The fix/workaround was to set the Ubuntu 24.04 distro as default: wsl --set-default Ubuntu-24.04. After doing that and relaunching WSL and Cursor, the files were copied and the dev container started right up.
@ravirahman@MattWang I hope this is helpful. It did fix the problem for me, but if I have to work in another distro I have to remember to set it to default, otherwise the dev container won’t start.
Hi @Eagle, we have fixed this issue in version 1.0.9 of the Anysphere WSL extension. It supports opening a container in a non-default WSL extension. Could you upgrade to the latest version?
Hi @ravirahman I am ran into this too. I also have multiple WSL distributions and I use Debian instead of Ubuntu.
wsl --list
Windows Subsystem for Linux Distributions:
Debian (Default)
Ubuntu
docker-desktop
I am running anysphere.remote-containers version 1.0.20 released 2025-07-25, 09:06:34
After carefully reading the readme for the extension, I saw that the Anysphere WSL plugin is necessary too. Once I installed that, I had difficulty with it installing and restarting the plugin’s server within the container. It reported “Unexpected end of JSON” a few times. The fifth time seemed to work and now I’m able to use Dev containers with WSL using the Anysphere plugins.
It would be helpful if the user was prompted to install the matching WSL plugin in the bottom left when a WSL environment is detected and set up is failing.
Hi @levischuck, thank you for this feedback. We found an issue with the extension installation prompts, where it does not recommend the WSL extension when opening Docker over WSL (or Docker over SSH). We are working on fixing this in version 1.4.0 of Cursor.
