Is it possible to develop with Dev Containers having only VS Code and Docker Desktop installed on the host OS?

I would like to avoid installing git for Windows and keep the source code on the host OS, because I don’t want to get into the trouble of mismatched line endings and file ownership.

Currently I resolve the problem by developing inside WSL, but it comes with a price of maintaining a full-blown Ubuntu with package updates, dist-updates, etc. And it’s all in a non-devops manner.

I wonder if Dev Containers would allow me to avoid having git for Windows and git inside WSL: just start a minimalistic Dev Container, it already has git inside, and go.

When I think about it, it seems to be a chicken-and-egg problem: to start a Dev Container, I need devcontainer.json and maybe Dockerfile. In order to get them, I need to clone a repo that contains them. But I want to do it inside a Container, but I don’t have one yet…

I’ve noticed that VS Code lets me start a new blank container from a Docker image such as alpine that has git. And VS Code has a feature of connecting Dev Containers.

So can I start a dev container, get an SSH key to GitHub, clone a repo that contains devcontainer.json into the container, then start another container in parallel from that devontainer.json?

Or something else in that fashion… The goal is develop in Dev Containers and avoid using git on the host OS or WSL.

Please provide step-by-step instructions including specific VS Code command pallete commands and configs.

Thanks! I hope my question makes sense. I want to DRY my dev env!