Devcontainers not working as expected

Bug Reports
1

Describe the Bug

I am familiar with devcontainers in VSCode so I want to use them in cursor too. Unfortunately I cannot get cursor to recognise my devcontainer configuration.

Steps to Reproduce

I have manually added file ./.devcontainer/devcontainer.json to my repo. I have installed the dev containers extension (anysphere.remote-containers version 1.0.12).

Expected Behavior

I was expecting that cursor would recognise my devcontainer.json file and ask me if I wanted to open the repository in a devcontainer. This has not happened.

I clicked on the “Open a remote window” icon in the very bottom-left of the cursor window and I see the options that you can see in the “Screenshots / Screen recordings” below. I select “Open folder in Container” and it opens the Mac open dialog asking me to navigate to and choose a folder, this is not what I want. I want cursor to recognise my devcontainer.json and build a devcontainer from it.

Note that everything seems to work fine in VSCode. I opened the folder in VSCode and it immediately prompted me to ask if I wanted to open in a devcontainer. I chose yes, it built the devcontainer and its working.

Screenshots / Screen Recordings

remoteoptions.png
remoteoptions.png584×345 25.7 KB

Operating System

MacOS

Current Cursor Version (Menu → About Cursor → Copy)

Version: 1.2.4 (Universal)
VSCode Version: 1.99.3
Commit: a8e95743c5268be73767c46944a71f4465d05c90
Date: 2025-07-10T16:55:16.443Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 23.6.0

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

3

The file should be in a folder called .devcontainer, not ./devcontainer.

That said, the Cursor team has completely broken devcontainer support in the last few days. They blocked the microsoft dev container extension, and replaced it with their own broken half-baked attempt, which doesn’t even allow my devcontainers to open any more.

5

Sorry, that was a typo. The folder is ./.devcontainer. I’ve corrected it above.

7

Hi @jamiekt, thank you for this feedback. Could you try updating to version 1.0.13 of the Anysphere Remote Containers extension? We added a prompt to “Reopen in Container” when we detect a devcontainers.json file is present.

For reference, you can also reopen a folder in a container through the command palette:

image
image1207×298 31.4 KB

8

Thank you @ravirahman . The extension seems to have updated itself and I’m now running 1.0.13. This time upon opening the repo it detected devcontainer.json and I was prompted to open in the devcontainer.

One question though. It opened a new cursor window for the devcontainer therefore I now have two cursor windows for the same repo, one using the devcontainer and one not. Is this intentional?

image
image1043×425 61.9 KB

10

Yes; you can close the original after the new window opens. We’ve found it’s helpful to keep the original window open – especially when working on the devcontainer.json file.

11

fair enough. Thank you.