VS Code Dev Containers with Podman Desktop on Windows
My friend and tech lead at QSC told me that he was considering switching from Docker to Podman on his Windows host. I had never used Podman before, but I was interested in trying it out with dev containers in Visual Studio Code and seeing if it was maybe something we could use going forward.
While doing some preliminary research, I came across blog posts, GitHub issues, and Stack Overflow questions that made it seem like there would be a lot of troubleshooting and configuration with getting everything set up on Windows. But it turns out that in 2025, it’s actually very simple to get set up with using Podman for VS Code dev containers on Windows!
This post walks through how to do this.
Table of Contents
Prerequisites
Make sure you have the following prerequisites:
- At least 6 GB of RAM for Podman
- Windows 10 (64-bit, Build 19043 or higher) or Windows 11
- Admin privileges
- If on a virtual machine, enable nested virtualization
- Visual Studio Code
Install Podman Desktop and Podman
Follow the official docs to install Podman Desktop, Podman, and create a Podman machine.
In the end, you should see something like this:
If you created a Podman machine that is WSL-based (recommended), the resources available to your Podman machine are the same as those that are globally shared across all your WSL distributions. You can see your resource limits by going to Settings → Resources:
If you need to adjust these limits, you can create a .wslconfig.
Set Up VS Code
First, install the Dev Containers extension for VS Code.
Then, update your dev.containers.dockerPath setting to podman:
Trying It Out
You should now be ready to run dev containers from VS Code with Podman. To try it out, from the Command Palette in VS Code (F1 or Ctrl+Shift+p), run the command Dev Containers: Try a Dev Container Sample… and select any of the samples:
VS Code will reload the window and then build and start the selected dev container. If everything goes well, you should see “Dev Container,” along with the name of your chosen sample, in the bottom left corner of the Status bar:
And that’s it! We have successfully installed Podman on Windows and set up VS Code to use it for dev containers! 🎉