Capacitor sync ios from within a docker container- possible?

Capacitor
1

I do a lot of development within Docker containers- specifically using VSCode Remote Containers, to keep a consistent development environment across machines. When building an iOS native app, obviously the final build must be done within XCode, however, I was hopeful that everything up until that point could be done within a container with a mounted volume. While building/serving up my ionic code works perfectly fine within the container, I am running into an issue when I try to run capacitor sync ios from within the container. Specifically, I get the following:

x Updating iOS native dependencies with pod install - failed!
x update ios - failed!
[error] ERR_SUBPROCESS_COMMAND_NOT_FOUND

so it appears that pod is not being found by the capacitor CLI process. However, if I manually execute (again from within the container):

cd ios/App; pod install

cocoapods properly runs, and I see Pod installation complete! There are 6 dependencies from the Podfile and 6 total pods installed.

Any thoughts on what may be going on here? Am I correct in assuming that the capacitor cli tool cannot find the pod binary for some reason?

2

Figured it out. The problem was in how VSCode sets up the user in the docker container. I had set the container up to have a node user as the default user when you exec into the container. This seemed to be causing the issue. To fix it, I commented out the "remoteUser": "node" setting in the devcontainer.json file, so when I was running in the container, I was running as root. I then needed to set the environment variable COCOAPODS_ALLOW_ROOT=True which allows cocoapods to run correctly. Now within the container I can do everything with the exception of the xcodebuild clean step.