Cline Development Environment

Code name: cline-dev

Installs the Cline AI coding agent extension for VS Code and Cursor, and optionally the cline CLI.

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
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

Unlike claude-dev/mistral-dev, this feature persists nothing across rebuilds. Cline stores its API key via VS Code’s own SecretStorage API (encrypted, under ~/.config/Code/User/globalStorage/saoudrizwan.claude-dev/) rather than a plain dotfile — there’s no single directory to bind-mount or volume-mount the way ~/.claude/~/.vibe work for the other two. Re-enter your API key (or run cline auth for the CLI) after a rebuild.

How it works

• 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: any (no OS-level installation — pure IDE configuration)
• Architectures: amd64, arm64

Version History

• 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.