Zed does not have built-in support for devcontainers, however for LaTeX this is not a barrier as texlab is not tightly coupled with LaTeX compilers anyway.
This template demonstrates how to configure Zed to build the document via docker-compose using a
texlive container image from dockerhub.
A benefit to this approach is not needing to install a LaTeX distribution directly, and a bit of extra confidence with the reproducibility of the build.
This template includes a config to have both forward and inverse search working with zathura (requires sed and bash on path).
Adjustments are necessary for other PDF viewers.
The corresponding section of .zed/settings.json (the "forwardSearch" item) could be deleted, and the autoconfig could be relied on instead (provided that works already), at the cost of inverse-search not working. Inverse-search needs extra care when compiling the document from inside the container, as the file path that will be attempted to be opened will actually be the path inside the container (not where zed is running).
This template is set up with build-on-save and forward-search after build.
Alternatively, one could use the tasks feature of Zed to build the document, by clicking the play button next to \documentclass in main.tex.
If doing so, set "lsp.texlab.settings.texlab.build.onSave" to false in .zed/settings.json.
Forward+inverse search are not set up here with tasks.
To run bash in the container (with the workspace), run the following in this directory:
docker compose -f .container/compose.yaml run shell... or just docker compose run shell in the .container directory.
If needing to run a latexmk command, for example latexmk -C, then you can also run:
docker compose -f .container/compose.yaml run latexmk -C