Mistral Vibe Development Environment (mistral-dev)

Installs the Mistral Vibe IDE extension across supported editors so every devcontainer gets AI-assisted coding powered by Mistral out of the box. Credentials and configuration stored in ~/.vibe/ on the host are linked into the container — they persist across all rebuilds, including --no-cache.

Example Usage

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

Add initializeCommand to your devcontainer.json so the host directory is guaranteed to exist before Docker tries to bind-mount it:

{
  "initializeCommand": "mkdir -p ~/.vibe",
  "features": {
    "ghcr.io/helpers4/devcontainer/mistral-dev:1": {}
  }
}

With the optional CLI:

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

Options

Option	Type	Default	Description
username	string	auto	Container user that receives the ~/.vibe symlink. auto detects vscode/node/codespace/uid-1000, in that order; set an explicit username to override.
installCli	boolean	false	Install the vibe CLI. Requires Python 3.12+ or uv in the container.

IDE support

Editor	Status	ID
VS Code	✅	mistralai.mistral-vibe-code
Cursor	✅	mistralai.mistral-vibe-code (same registry as VS Code)

How it works

Extension

The feature declares the mistralai.mistral-vibe-code extension via the customizations field in devcontainer-feature.json. The devcontainer runtime installs it automatically.

Credential persistence

1. Build time (install.sh): generates /usr/local/share/mistral-dev/setup-credentials.sh with the target user’s home path baked in.
2. Mount (devcontainer-feature.json → mounts): bind-mounts $HOME/.vibe from the host to /mnt/h4vibe inside the container.
3. Every start (postStartCommand): setup-credentials.sh replaces ~/.vibe with a symlink to /mnt/h4vibe — credentials and config survive rebuilds.

This means:

• Credentials survive container rebuilds (including --no-cache).
• First-time auth inside the container writes back to the host automatically.
• VIBE_HOME is not required — the symlink is transparent to Mistral Vibe.

Docker refuses to start the container if a bind-mount source has never existed on the host (fresh machine, first Vibe login). A Feature’s devcontainer-feature.json can’t fix this itself — initializeCommand set there is silently ignored by the devcontainers CLI, only the consumer’s top-level devcontainer.json is honored for it — which is why initializeCommand above is required in your own config rather than bundled into the feature. If /mnt/h4vibe is not mounted (e.g. missing initializeCommand, standalone test), the script errors out — check that initializeCommand is present in your devcontainer.json.

CLI (optional)

When installCli: true, the vibe command is installed at build time via uv (preferred) or pip. See Mistral Vibe CLI docs.

OS and Architecture Support

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