Hello friend, and welcome to the Code Server IDE project.

This repo contains tools and info to run your cloud based development environment with VSCode as main UI 😎.

You will get a virtual machine that is ready for any kind of development you can possibly do on a Linux machine.

You can link your machine to a custom DNS like dev.yourname.com and expose any service you are working on as service.dev.yourname.com with both http and https interfaces thanks to the Letsencrypt integration. You can access your IDE from different browsers on different devices and everything will stay in sync, this way you will be able to enjoy endless multiple screens.

You can stop your virtual machine when you don't need it, and you can change its power at any time adjusting it to the task you're about to perform. This means you will use money wisely, when you need it, for the task at hand.

Here is what you get:

• Your fully dedicated Linux machine running Ubuntu
• VSCode running in a browser
• An automatic reverse proxy for Docker containers and local processes
• Real-time monitoring with NetData
• File system management FUI with FileBrowser
• Automatic DNS updates with CloudFlare
• A CLI that helps performing lot of tasks:
  • Start/stop/restart services
  • Access logs
  • Get generic info such IP or machine's DNS
  • Create https enabled proxies to your local processes
  • Kill a running process on a specific port
  • Change password
  • Update DNS
  • Update the IDE
• Lot of pre-installed software:
  • Code-Server
  • Docker
  • Docker-Compose
  • Make
  • Ctop
  • NVM, NodeJS, NPM
  • dotNET SDK & Framework
  • AWS-CLI
  • NetData
  • FileBrowser

In order to follow this tutorial and get to the final result, I suggest you get prepared with:

• an AWS account where you can create a new virtual machine
• a domain name that you can use like yourname.com
• [optional] CloudFlare's ZONE_ID and an API_KEY for an automatic DNS setup
• [optional] A Sendgrid API_KEY to send yourself a welcome mail once the machine is ready

You should also consider this desired skills:

• You should feel comfortable creating EC2 instances
• You should feel comfortable accessing EC2 instances via SSH
• You should feel comfortable creating type A DNS entries for your domain name
• You should setup your Sendgrid account and retrieve a valid API KEY
• You may want to proxy your domain name through CloudFlare and retrieve an API KEY and ZONE ID

Cloud Server IDE, uses ports 80 and 443 that should be accessible from anywhere for the Letsencrypt integration to take place smoothly.

You should also open up port 22 in case you need to access your machine via ssh.
(This is needed in case you configure your DNS manually)

Create a new EC2 Instance based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, a t2.micro is more than enough to try this out.
(Later on you will be able to create a bigger machine for real development)

Be careful during the step Step 3: Configure Instance Details as you need to paste and customize one of the following configurations. This is actually the script that will install all the needed software and setup your system so to boot properly.

User Data - With AWS' default DNS:

👉 Use this configuration just for test, as https will not be available.

#!/bin/bash

git clone https://github.com/marcopeg/code-server-ide.git ${CODE_SERVER_CWD:-/home/ubuntu/code-server-ide}
${CODE_SERVER_CWD:-/home/ubuntu/code-server-ide}/src/setup.sh

In order to follow what's going on, ssh into the machine and tail the setup logs file:

tail -f code-server-ide/data/logs/setup.log

NOTE: With this minimal configuration, you will be able to access the machine using EC2's default DNS which will NOT allow Letsencrypt to provide a valid SSL certificate as they are black-listed.

Therefore, you will have to go through the security alert and accept the risks in accessing your machine via http. Don't use it for production purposes!

User Data - With CloudFlare DNS Management:

👉 Use this configuration if you proxy your DNS through CloudFlare.

#!/bin/bash

# This configuration will automaticall setup the DNS for you:
export CODE_SERVER_DNS="dev.yourname.com"
export CLOUDFLARE_ZONE_ID="xxx"
export CLOUDFLARE_API_KEY="yyy"

# This (optional) configuration is used to send a welcom email
# every time the machine boots up:
export CODE_SERVER_EMAIL="[email protected]"
export SENDGRID_API_KEY="zzz"

git clone https://github.com/marcopeg/code-server-ide.git ${CODE_SERVER_CWD:-/home/ubuntu/code-server-ide}
${CODE_SERVER_CWD:-/home/ubuntu/code-server-ide}/src/setup.sh

User Data - Without CloudFlare DNS Management:

👉 Use this configuration in case you will configure your DNS manually.

#!/bin/bash

# This configuration sets up the DNS inside the machine, but will
# NOT run the application.
# You should first manually configure your DNS, then ssh into the
# EC2 machien and run `cs start ide` to run the application.
#
# It is a good idea to give an ElasticIP to your machine.
export CODE_SERVER_AUTO_START="no" # <- this is very important
export CODE_SERVER_DNS="dev.yourname.com"

# This (optional) configuration is used to send a welcom email
# every time the machine boots up:
export CODE_SERVER_EMAIL="[email protected]"
export SENDGRID_API_KEY="zzz"

git clone https://github.com/marcopeg/code-server-ide.git ${CODE_SERVER_CWD:-/home/ubuntu/code-server-ide}
${CODE_SERVER_CWD:-/home/ubuntu/code-server-ide}/src/setup.sh

Please be careful setting CODE_SERVER_AUTO_START="no" so that you need to start your IDE manually.

To get your machine ready requires time. Please wait up to 5 minutes before you start worry. If you really freak out and want to know what's going on, ssh into that machine and run:

tail -f ~/code-server-ide/data/logs/setup.log

Once the machine is ready, you should receive a confirmation email (given you set up the SENDGRID_API_KEY) with the machine's IP.

If you used the Cloudflare integration, you can simply click on the link from the email and use the password to access your new IDE. Else, you need to setup your DNS as explained in the next paragraph.

Open up your DNS management tool and add 2 A�records towards the machine's IP (that is available via the AWS Panel, and it is also provided in the confirmation email):

Type   Name   Target
-------------------------
A      dev    11.22.33.44
A      *.dev  11.22.33.44

Then you should ssh into your machine and run the project:

cs start

In a few minutes your system should be up and running, and a new SSL certificate should be created via Letsencrypt. Try to access your new IDE, maybe do it via incognito the first time.

👉 RE-ENABLE AUTO START:
When everything works, you should change the value of CODE_SERVER_AUTO_START to yes (or simply remove the variable) from ~/code-server-ide/.env so that your IDE will start automatically in case you restart the EC2 machine.

You can find detailed information about installing & upgrading code-server here, but the gist of it is:

curl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh
sudo reboot

You can run any process on the host's machine (aka: NodeJS or anything else) and easily proxy it so to get an https enabled DNS automatically.

Step 1: start a NodeJS App:

npx create-react-app foobar
cd foobar
npm start

Step 2: proxy it:

cs proxy up -p 3000

The proxy will be available at:

https://p3000.your.website.com

When you want to remove the proxy, just type:

cs proxy down -p 3000

If you are a little bit like me, you want to know what's going on in your machine. Ctop helps out a bit with Docker containers, but you may be running plenty more processes on the OS.

NetData is among the coolest data-collection tools I've found online. And it's easy to run it in Docker. With Cloud Server IDE, you have an even easier time:

cs start netdata

then go to:

# The trailing slash is important!
https://your.development.box/netdata/

and when you want to stop it:

cs stop netdata

Yes, it is that simple 😎.

It's often useful to have a GUI to walk through files and folders, upload and download stuff. FileBrowser is a very decent tool for that, and works fine in Docker.

Take advantage of the CLI to run this service:

cs start filebrowser

then go to:

# The trailing slash is important!
https://your.development.box/filebrowser/

and when you want to stop it:

cs stop filebrowser

👉 NOTE: This service has full access to your home folder.

I strongly suggest you keep it running only while you need it and then you stop it.

Take a look at the examples folders, where you can find a few apps that run in Docker and get automatically proxied through Traefik.

The default configuration has an issue with that keyboard shortcut that could be easily fixed by a change of configuration:

1. Open: File > Preferences > Settings
2. Search: keyboard.dispatch
3. Set: keyCode

Now, it should work fine.
You can find the issue page here.

Using Nodemon caused the following error:

[nodemon] Internal watch failed: ENOSPC: System limit for number of file watchers reached, watch '/home/ubuntu/projects/tmp/auth-server'

Found the following solution from this Stackoverflow:

echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p