Cline Development Environment

Code name: cline-dev

Installs the Cline AI coding agent extension for VS Code and Cursor, and optionally the cline CLI. Provider keys, settings and task history persist in a Docker named volume linked into the container — they survive all rebuilds, including --no-cache, and GitHub Codespaces.

Also included automatically: repairs broken host paths in your git config and restores your SSH commit-signing key on every attach, on both local and cloud containers, with nothing to set up on your end — see helpers4-common for how it works.

Naming note: Cline’s VS Code marketplace ID is still saoudrizwan.claude-dev — a holdover from before the project renamed itself from “Claude Dev” to Cline. It has nothing to do with this repo’s own claude-dev feature, which installs Anthropic’s official Claude Code extension.

Example Usage

{
  "features": {
    "ghcr.io/helpers4/devcontainer/cline-dev:1": {}
  }
}

With the CLI:

{
  "features": {
    "ghcr.io/helpers4/devcontainer/cline-dev:1": {
      "installCli": true
    }
  }
}

Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
username	string	auto	Container user that receives the ~/.cline symlink. auto detects vscode/node/codespace/uid-1000, in that order; set an explicit username to override.
installCli	boolean	false	Install the Cline CLI (cline command) via npm. Requires Node.js/npm; skipped with a warning if not found.

IDE support

Editor	Status	ID
VS Code	✅	saoudrizwan.claude-dev
Cursor	✅	saoudrizwan.claude-dev (same registry as VS Code)

Credentials

Cline (extension 4.x and CLI alike) keeps everything under ~/.cline/data/: provider API keys in settings/providers.json, global state, task history. VS Code’s SecretStorage is only read once, to migrate keys from older versions.

~/.cline is a symlink to the Docker named volume helpers4-cline-credentials-${devcontainerId}, mounted at /mnt/h4cline — the same model as claude-dev and mistral-dev. The volume is dedicated to this devcontainer: keys survive rebuilds of this project, but never bleed into another one, so you sign in once per devcontainer, not once per machine. The extension and the CLI share it, so cline auth in the terminal and the extension see the same keys.

No initializeCommand required — Docker creates the volume automatically the first time it’s needed.

How it works

• Persistence: install.sh links ~/.cline to /mnt/h4cline at image build time, so the link is valid from the very first process in the container — the extension never starts against an empty ~/.cline. Once per container (postCreateCommand), setup-credentials.sh makes sure the volume is writable by the container user, and restores the link if something replaced it.
• Extension: declared via customizations.vscode.extensions in devcontainer-feature.json — the devcontainer runtime installs it automatically, no install.sh involvement needed.
• CLI (installCli: true): install.sh runs npm install -g cline at build time. If npm isn’t present, the install is skipped with a warning rather than failing the build — add a Node.js feature (e.g. ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/node) before cline-dev if you want the CLI.

OS and Architecture Support

• OS: Linux (Debian/Ubuntu-based images)
• Architectures: amd64, arm64

Version History

• v1.1.0: Provider keys, settings and task history now survive rebuilds: ~/.cline is linked to a Docker named volume dedicated to this devcontainer. Earlier versions persisted nothing, and this README wrongly said Cline kept its keys in VS Code’s SecretStorage — Cline 4.x stores them in ~/.cline/data/settings/providers.json. New username option; now depends on helpers4-common. You’ll need to sign in once more after upgrading.
• v1.0.1: Internal cleanup, no behavior change — dropped a dead _BUILD_ARG_INSTALLCLI fallback in install.sh. That prefix is only ever set for the legacy internalVersion: "1" manifest shape, which this feature (and every other one in this repo) never declared — the fallback never fired, ${INSTALLCLI:-false} alone always resolved the same value.
• v1.0.0: Initial release.