runServices and compose depends_on

[dtheodor]

The runServices devcontainer property for docker compose specifies additional services from the compose file that should be started. If not specified, it starts all of them.

But doesn't the depends_on setting in compose itself cover this need? With the much saner default of not starting any additional services if not specified. Is there any rationale that I am missing here? At the moment it feels like I just need to specify these twice for no good reason.

[slominskir]

There is definitely overlap and confusion here. To make matters worse, the IntelliJ (JetBrains) devcontainer runtime behaves differently here than the Microsoft codespaces / VSCode devcontainer runtime. In the absence of runServices Microsoft's products effectively invoke docker compose up whereas JetBrains invokes docker compose up <dev-container-name>. And without depends_on that means JetBrains defaults to launching only the devcontainer itself and no other services defined in the compose.yaml whereas Microsoft defaults to launching all services in this same scenario.