[feat] Official devcontainer feature for CAO

[ThePlenkov]

Summary

Publish an official devcontainer feature that installs CAO + web UI into any devcontainer with a single line:

"features": {
    "ghcr.io/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/cao": {
        "version": "latest",
        "webui": true,
        "port": 9889
    }
}

Motivation

CAO is designed to orchestrate multiple CLI agents, which is a perfect fit for devcontainers — isolated environments where you can install multiple agent CLIs and run them together. Currently, setting up CAO in a devcontainer requires:

1. Install system deps (tmux, git, curl)
2. pip install CAO from GitHub
3. Clone the repo separately to build the web UI (npm install && npm run build)
4. Copy the built web UI to the correct location inside the installed package
5. Configure CORS, networking, and agent pre-configuration

A devcontainer feature would reduce this to a single JSON line.

Proposed Feature Structure

features/
└── cao/
    ├── devcontainer-feature.json
    └── install.sh

devcontainer-feature.json

{
    "id": "cao",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "name": "CLI Agent Orchestrator",
    "description": "Multi-agent orchestration framework for CLI-based AI coding agents",
    "options": {
        "version": {
            "type": "string",
            "default": "latest",
            "description": "CAO version (git ref or 'latest')"
        },
        "webui": {
            "type": "boolean",
            "default": true,
            "description": "Build and include the web UI"
        },
        "port": {
            "type": "string",
            "default": "9889",
            "description": "Server port"
        },
        "headless": {
            "type": "boolean",
            "default": true,
            "description": "Auto-configure agents for non-interactive use"
        }
    },
    "installsAfter": [
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/node",
        "ghcr.io/devcontainers/features/python"
    ],
    "entrypoint": "/usr/local/share/cao/entrypoint.sh"
}

install.sh

The install script would handle:

1. System deps (tmux)
2. pip install CAO
3. Web UI build (if webui=true)
4. Entrypoint creation for auto-start and headless config

Companion Features

Individual agent CLI features could also be published:

• ghcr.io/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/claude-code
• ghcr.io/awslabs/cli-agent-orchestrator/codex
• etc.

These would handle CLI installation + auth config mounting, and could be used independently or with the CAO feature.

Reference Implementation

We have a working devcontainer feature setup at cao-poc with features for CAO, Claude Code, Codex, and Devin CLI — all tested in devcontainers on Docker Desktop / WSL2.

Related

• [feat] Non-interactive / headless mode for containerized deployments #152 (Non-interactive/headless mode) — the headless option in the feature would use this
• [feat] Make CORS origins configurable #151 (Configurable CORS) — the port option needs CORS to follow
• [bug] WebSocket PTY rejects connections from Docker bridge IPs #149 (Docker bridge IPs) — required for the web UI to work from the host