How to structure multi-location projects for devcontainer development?

[philiporlando]

I'm working on designing a project structure and development workflow for an OSS Dagster deployment using Docker Compose for production. I'm trying to integrate devcontainers for local development but running into some organizational challenges.

Current Approach

I'm organizing my team's work into separate code locations, with each having its own Dockerfile. The challenge is that developing on any single code location still requires Dagster's core services (webserver, daemon, PostgreSQL, etc.).

My current thinking is to:

• Create a development docker-compose.yaml in each code location directory that spins up only that location plus the necessary Dagster services
• Use a separate production docker-compose.yaml at the root directory that orchestrates all code locations.

However, this approach seems to require maintaining separate development versions of dagster.yaml and workspace.yaml for each code location's devcontainer. As we scale, managing these files (multiple docker-compose.yaml, Dockerfile, dagster.yaml, and workspace.yaml per location) feels like significant overhead.

my-dagster-deployment/
├── docker-compose.yaml          # Production: orchestrates all code locations
├── dagster.yaml                 # Production Dagster configuration
├── Dockerfile                   # Production Dockerfile for core Dagster services
├── workspace.yaml               # Production: references all code locations
└── code_locations/
    └── code_location_1/
        ├── .venv
        ├── .devcontainer/
        │   └── devcontainer.json
        ├── docker-compose.dev.yaml    # Development: this location + core services
        ├── dagster.yaml               # Development Dagster config
        ├── workspace.yaml             # Development: references this location only
        ├── Dockerfile
        ├── pyproject.toml
        ├── uv.lock
        ├── code_location_1_module/
        │   └── definitions.py
        └── tests/

Questions

1. Is there a more DRY approach to structuring mutli-location Dagster projects with devcontainers? Are there patterns for sharing configuration across development environments without duplicating these files?
2. How should I handle cross-location asset dependencies during development? If an asset in Code Location A depends on an asset in Code Location B, do I need to include both locations in my development compose file to properly test and debug? What's the recommended workflow here?

I appreciate Dagster's flexibility, but I want to make sure I'm setting up a structure that will scale well. Has anyone tackled similar challenges or have insights to share?