Minimal devcontainer with Codex for messing around with AI stuff

This is my minimal devcontainer for playing around with AI stuff, using Codex. It includes Python, Node, gh and the Codex CLI. Running in a devcontainer gives me a clean environment to mess with and further sandboxes the coding agent.

To use create a .devcontainer directory in your project and add the following devcontainer.json file:

{
	"name": "Minimal Codex And Dev Container",
	"image": "mcr.microsoft.com/devcontainers/base:trixie",
	"features": {
		"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/github-cli:1": {},
		"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/node:1": {},
		"ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/python:1": {}
	},
	// -i to force interactive shell which nvm requires
	"postCreateCommand": "bash -i .devcontainer/complete_setup.sh"
}

Then add the following complete_setup.sh script to the same directory:

#!/bin/bash

# install latest node
nvm install --lts && nvm use --lts 

# install codex
npm install -g @openai/codex

# install uv
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

Then launch your devcontainer. I use VS Code to do this.

Finally run codex with:

codex -c sandbox_workspace_write.network_access=true --search

This gives codex access to the network and ability to perform web searches.