Dev Container with access to AI on external server

[ReaperMantis]

Hello,
I am using dev containers to work on some projects and would like to try to make use of the AI features at the same time. I have an Ollama setup on a separate computer from the one that runs Theia. Theia on its own can resolve and connect to my Ollama setup. Once I enter a dev container however, I am unable to access that Ollama server.

How does one configure for this scenario? Is there a devcontainer.json setting that might work?

I have tried

"runArgs": [
    "--net=host"
  ],

and

"runArgs": [
    "--network=host"
  ],

but these are unsuccessful in allowing the dev container connect to the Ollama system. The container that Theia builds is always using the "NetworkMode": "bridge".

My Theia system is running on Ubuntu 24.04 with Docker Desktop 4.41.2 (191736) installed.

Any help is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[msujew]

cc @jonah-iden, do we support runArgs in dev containers right now?

[jonah-iden]

no we do not have support for runArgs yet. I don't even know if we even could support run args since we are using dockerode for container creation and management. We would have to parse the entries and map those options to dockerode ones.
But we also don't have support yet for changing the network mode in general

[jonah-iden]

If you'd like to contribute something you could start by taking a look at dockerode and the docker-container-service.ts file

[ReaperMantis]

Thanks for the quick response! I don't have much free time at the moment, I can't promise anything.

Before I get ahead of myself, would NetworkMode=host even achieve what I'm looking for?