Dev containers not working? Check if you’re using Flatpak VS Code

Antoni Borowski — Sun, 27 Jul 2025 22:09:23 +0000

I spent ~30 minutes wondering why my dev containers weren’t seeing the Docker engine running.
Docker was working fine in the terminal, but VS Code couldn’t connect.

I was about to reinstall everything when I realized I had installed VS Code via Flatpak.

As we all know, Flatpak apps run in a sandbox, so vscode has no access to /var/run/docker.sock by default

Solution:
Install VS Code from your system package manager (e.g. .deb, .rpm, or the official tarball).

Takeaway:
Before debugging like crazy, double-check how your app is installed — sandboxed formats like Flatpak can break common development workflows.

DEV Community: Antoni Borowski

Dev containers not working? Check if you’re using Flatpak VS Code