Remote VS Code

Introduction

One of the coolest things I have recently found is the code-server project by cdr. It enables users to run Visual Studio Code inside remote servers! This blog post describes the procedure for setting all this up.

Setup

Prerequisites

This setup requires you to have a remote UNIX server. I have tested this using an AWS EC2 instance, but it will work with similar solutions from other cloud vendors too.
Your remote server should have enabled access from your IP. In case of AWS, you can do this in the following way:
- Go to your AWS console and open the EC2 service.
- Select the instance that you want to run VSCode on.
- In the details pane below, look at the inbound and outbound rules for this instance.
- If it has been allowed access from everywhere, better delete that rule for security.
- Go to the security group added to this instance and edit the inbound rules.
- Add a new rule and select type as HTTPS and IP as My IP from the dropdown menu
- Do this again for HTTP.
- save this setting, and now this instance can only be accessed from your IP.

Bash script for automated setup

Now that we have ensured access to our server, we need to install code-server to our server.
Make sure that you are able to SSH to your instance.
Now, simply download the script below to your instance and run it.

https://gist.github.com/manparvesh/f7890a6031e076f7b4587bcfdcd4eeb2

About the script

The above script performs the following actions:

Downloads the specified version of code-server on the instance
Sets up secure connection for this server

Configuring the script

In case a newer version of code-server is released and you want to use that, you can change the version inside the script by changing the CODE_SERVER_VERSION variable.
For running this script on a macOS server, change the CODE_SERVER_ARCH variable

Running the server

Now that our server is configured, we can run our server using the following server:

sudo ./code-server -p 80 --cert=~/certs/MyCertificate.crt --cert-key=~/certs/MyKey.key "~"

Using the server

Now everything is setup and VSCode server is running to. Go ahead and open the following link in your browser:

https://<your instance public IP>:80/

You will be asked for a password to enter, which you will find in the server logs while running it. Now enjoy making changes in the server using this setup! :smile: