Kimi Code Development Environment

Code name: kimi-dev

Installs the Kimi Code IDE extension (moonshot-ai.kimi-code) for VS Code and Cursor, and optionally the kimi CLI. Credentials and configuration 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.

Example Usage

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

With the CLI:

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

Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
username	string	auto	Container user that receives the ~/.kimi-code symlink. auto detects vscode/node/codespace/uid-1000, in that order; set an explicit username to override.
installCli	boolean	false	Install the Kimi Code CLI (kimi command) via the official native installer. Skipped with a warning if the installer fails.

IDE support

Editor	Status	ID
VS Code	✅	moonshot-ai.kimi-code
Cursor	✅	moonshot-ai.kimi-code (same registry as VS Code)

Credentials

Kimi Code keeps everything under ~/.kimi-code/: config.toml, OAuth credentials from /login, session state.

~/.kimi-code is a symlink to the Docker named volume helpers4-kimi-credentials-${devcontainerId}, mounted at /mnt/h4kimicode — the same model as claude-dev, mistral-dev and cline-dev. The volume is dedicated to this devcontainer: credentials survive rebuilds of this project, but never bleed into another one, so you sign in once per devcontainer, not once per machine.

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

How it works

• Persistence: install.sh links ~/.kimi-code to /mnt/h4kimicode at image build time, so the link is valid from the very first process in the container — the extension never starts against an empty ~/.kimi-code. 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 the official installer (https://code.kimi.com/kimi-code/install.sh) at build time with KIMI_INSTALL_DIR=/usr/local, so the binary lands directly at /usr/local/bin/kimi — on PATH for every user, and outside the persisted ~/.kimi-code volume (the installer’s default install dir is ~/.kimi-code, which would collide with the volume symlink). No Node.js required. If the installer fails (network, unsupported platform), the build continues with a warning rather than failing.

OS and Architecture Support

• OS: Linux (Debian/Ubuntu-based images; the CLI’s native installer does not support Alpine/musl — use npm install -g @moonshot-ai/kimi-code there instead)
• Architectures: amd64, arm64

Version History

• v1.0.0: Initial release.