containers-tutorial | You can access the HTML version of this tutorial | Learning library

You need to make sure you are not connected to your remote host via Remote-SSH in VSCode. If you are, you will not see "Open Folder in Container..." or the other options.

Try opening up VSCode without connecting using Remote-SSH. You will find that the option is now present.

To set up a remote Docker host, you first need to be able to access your remote host using key based authentication as describe here

You then set "docker.host":"ssh://your-remote-user@your-remote-machine-fqdn-or-ip-here" in setting.json.

Once that is setup, you can only attach to running containers. Test this out before proceeding:

1. Start a container on the remote host
2. Hit F1 in your vscode and then select "Attach to Running Container..."
3. You should see the container you started and you should be able to attach to this

Once you are past this point, you will need to create your devcontainer.json file as per the documentation

Provided the container is still running and has not been terminated or has not correctly been set up (or else docker ps might not list it), as a diagnostic tool, you can use the exec command, available from Docker 1.3 that allows to run a command to an existing running instance of a container. So you can open a shell, ssh, or just ls and explore its file system to understand what that running container instance is about.

While not a complete solution, I hope this helps.