Overview

crib is a CLI tool that reads your .devcontainer/devcontainer.json config, builds the container, and gets out of your way. No agents injected into your container, no SSH tunnels, no IDE integration. Just Docker (or Podman) doing what Docker does.

Principles

Implicit workspace resolution. cd into a project directory and run commands. crib walks up from your current directory to find .devcontainer/devcontainer.json. No workspace names to remember.
No agent injection. All container setup happens via docker exec from the host. Nothing gets installed inside your container that you didn’t ask for.
No SSH, no providers, no IDE integration. crib is a CLI tool. It starts containers. What you do inside them is your business.
Docker and Podman as first-class runtimes. Auto-detected, configurable via CRIB_RUNTIME.
Human-readable naming. Containers show up as crib-myproject-a1b2c3d in docker ps, not opaque hashes. The short suffix makes workspace IDs unique across different directories with the same name.

Why

The devcontainer spec is a good idea. A JSON file describes your development environment, and tooling builds a container from it. But the existing tools layer on complexity that gets in the way.

DevPod was the most promising open-source option: provider-agnostic, IDE-agnostic, well-designed. But it was built for a broader scope than most people need. Providers, agents injected into containers, SSH tunnels, gRPC, IDE integrations. For someone who just wants to docker exec into a container and use their terminal, that is a lot of moving parts between you and your shell.

Then DevPod seems to be effectively abandoned when Loft Labs shifted focus to vCluster. The project stopped receiving updates in April 2025, with no official statement and no path forward for the community.

crib takes a different approach: do less, but do it well. Read the devcontainer config, build the image, run the container, set up the user and lifecycle hooks, done. No agents, no SSH, no providers, no IDE assumptions. Just Docker (or Podman) doing what Docker does. For a detailed breakdown, see the comparison with alternatives.

Background

This isn’t the first time @fgrehm has gone down this road. vagrant-boxen (2013) tried to make Vagrant machines manageable without needing Puppet or Chef expertise. Ventriloquist (2013) combined Vagrant and Docker to give developers portable, disposable dev VMs. devstep (2014) took it further with “git clone, one command, hack” using Docker and Heroku-style buildpacks. The devcontainer spec has since standardized what that project was trying to achieve, so crib builds on that foundation instead of reinventing it.

The experience of using DevPod as a terminal-first developer, treating devcontainers as remote machines you SSH into rather than IDE-managed environments, shaped many of crib’s design decisions. The pain points (broken git signing wrappers, unnecessary cache invalidation, port forwarding conflicts, agent-related complexity) all pointed toward the same conclusion: the simplest path is often the best one.