Control Dev Environments Better with Hardened Docker Desktop (and More!)

Are you looking for even simpler and faster ways to do what you need in Docker Desktop? Whether you’re an admin looking for new ways to secure the supply chain or a developer who wants to discover new Docker Extensions or streamline your use of Dev Environments, Docker Desktop 4.13 has the updates you’re looking for. Read on to see what’s part of this release! 

Enhanced security and management for Docker Business customers

With this release, we’re introducing a new Docker Desktop security model: Hardened Docker Desktop. This model includes two new features for Docker Business customers — Settings Management and Enhanced Container Isolation.

Settings Management

With Settings Management, admins can configure Docker Desktop’s settings on client machines throughout their org. In the new admin-settings.json file, admins are able to configure important security settings like proxies and network ranges, and ensure that these values can’t be modified by users.

Enhanced Container Isolation

For an extra layer of security, admins can also enable Enhanced Container Isolation, which ensures that any configurations set with Settings Management cannot be modified by user containers. Enhanced Container Isolation ensures that all containers run unprivileged in the Docker Desktop Linux VM using the Linux user-namespace, as well as introducing a host of other security enhancements. These features are the first within Docker’s new Hardened Docker Desktop security model for Docker Business customers, which provides more granular control over Docker Desktop’s Linux VM.

Docker Extensions Categories

The Docker Extension Marketplace continues to grow, with over 25 extensions added since we launched at DockerCon! With all of these new options, it might be hard to know which extension will benefit you the most in your day to day workflows. 

That’s why in Docker Desktop 4.13, you can now search the Extensions Marketplace by title, description, or author. But there’s more — we also now provide a list of categories for filtering as per our roadmap issue.

The below screenshot shows the new categories that allow you to find useful extensions more easily. There’s categories for Kubernetes, security, testing tools, and more!
Are there any extensions you’d like to see in the Marketplace? Let us know here!

How can I categorize my extension?

If you plan to publish your extension to the Marketplace, you can specify to which categories your extension belongs to. Add the label com.docker.extension.categories to the extension’s Dockerfile, followed by a list of comma separated values with the category keys defined in the docs.

For instance:

LABEL com.docker.extension.categories=”kubernetes,security”

Note that extensions published to the Marketplace before the 22nd of September 2022 have been auto-categorized by Docker, so if you’re the author of any of these, you don’t have to do anything.

Streamlined Dev Environments Experience

We’ve also made a number of improvements to Dev Environments with Docker Desktop 4.13:

CLI Plugin

Use the new docker dev CLI plugin to get the full Dev Environments experience from the terminal in addition to the Dashboard.

Launch from a Git repo

Now you can quickly launch a new environment from a Git repo:

docker dev create https://github.com/dockersamples/compose-dev-env

Simplified project configuration

Now all you need to get started is a compose-dev.yaml file. If you have an existing project with a .docker/ folder — don’t worry! It’ll be migrated automatically the next time you launch.

Dev Environments is still in beta, and your feedback is more important than ever. You can submit feedback directly from the Dev Environments tab in Docker Desktop.

What other features would make your life easier?

Now that you’ve learned what’s new, let us know what you think! Is there a feature or extension that will make using Docker an even better experience for you? Check out our public roadmap to leave feedback and to see what else is coming.