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A development container, or dev container, lets you define an identical, isolated environment that every engineer on your team can run. With Claude Code installed in that container, commands Claude runs execute inside it rather than on the host machine, while edits to your project files appear in your local repository as you work. This page covers installing Claude Code in a dev container, then a set of self-contained configuration topics: persisting authentication across rebuilds, enforcing organization policy, restricting network egress, and running without permission prompts. Read the ones that match your setup.
While the dev container provides substantial protections, no system is completely immune to all attacks. When executed with --dangerously-skip-permissions, dev containers do not prevent a malicious project from exfiltrating anything accessible inside the container, including the Claude Code credentials stored in ~/.claude. Only use dev containers when developing with trusted repositories, and monitor Claude’s activities. Avoid mounting host secrets such as ~/.ssh or cloud credential files into the container; prefer repository-scoped or short-lived tokens.