Run it locally with VS Code Dev Containers¶

1. Give Docker enough memory¶

Docker Desktop (macOS / Windows)Linux (Docker Engine)

Settings → Resources: set Memory to at least 8 GB (10 GB recommended), CPUs to 4 and Disk to at least 40 GB. Apply & restart.

On Windows use the WSL 2 backend and clone the repository inside the WSL filesystem (e.g. ~/src/kid), not under C:\. It is much faster.

Nothing to configure; containers can use all host memory. Make sure your user can run docker ps without sudo.

Apple Silicon

The dev container downloads the arm64 build of every tool, and all container images used by the TRE are multi-architecture, so M1–M4 Macs work natively.

2. Get the code¶

# with a fork (recommended - enables the GitOps labs)
git clone https://github.com/<you>/kid.git
# or read-only
git clone https://github.com/karectl/kid.git
cd kid
code .

3. Open in the container¶

VS Code asks "Reopen in Container?". Click it (or run Dev Containers: Reopen in Container from the command palette). The first build downloads ~1.5 GB and takes 5–10 minutes.

4. Open the TRE¶

The k3s-server container publishes port 80 on your machine, so the TRE is at http://localhost/.

Port 80 already in use?

Set TRE_HTTP_PORT on your machine before opening the container, e.g.

export TRE_HTTP_PORT=8080
code .

The TRE will then be at http://localhost:8080/. If the container was already created, run Dev Containers: Rebuild Container after setting the variable.

Options¶

All of these are read from your machine's environment when the container is created:

Variable	Default	Purpose
`TRE_HTTP_PORT`	`80`	Host port for the TRE
`KID_ENABLE_KYVERNO`	`true`	Set `false` on tight-memory laptops to skip Kyverno (~300 MB)
`KID_GITOPS_REPO`	your `origin` remote	Git repository Argo CD follows
`KID_GITOPS_REVISION`	current branch	Branch, tag or commit Argo CD follows

Push before you bootstrap

Argo CD reads from GitHub. If you create a new local branch, push it before running the bootstrap, or Argo CD will fail with "unable to resolve revision". The bootstrap prints a warning if the branch is missing on the remote.

Next: First steps.