Remote Development Environment

Your 5 year old MacBook Air doesn't cut the mustard anymore. You like MacOS and VSCode but you need more powaaaar! 🚀

This repository will help you set up a remote dev box on AWS. It's pretty opinionated, as it's what I use so feel free to fork to your own needs! 😉

So... I want to use the remote ssh plugin of VSCode on MacOS to connect to an EC2 instance on AWS. I also like .zshrc for my terminal and I want to setup tmux in case my connection drops and my docker-compose stack stops. Oh, and I live in London, so that's the datacenter location I want.

VSCode Remote SSH extension

Install the Remote SSH extension

AWS account

Before you do anything, you need to create an account on AWS

Once you're logged in the console, add a user and select the user. Click on the Security credentials tab, then click on Create access keys. Save this somewhere or download the file.

Free tier

So the idea is that if you have a new account, you'll be eligible for the 12-month free tier promo,ie 750hrs on a t2.micro instance per month.

Homebrew

I assume you have Homebrew installed on your Mac. If not, why not?!?

You can find it here. Just copy the install script and run it in your terminal.

AWS CLI (Optional)

You can install and set up the the AWS CLI after running the following commands.

brew install awscli

aws configure

Terraform

We will use Terraform to set up the infrastructure for our remote dev box.

Ansible

We will use Ansible to install packages and configuration on both the remote server and our local machine.

Install Terraform and Ansible

brew install ansible terraform

Github

Get an access token from Github. We will be needing this so that your remote box can connect to your private repos on Github. For more info click here

Set up your requirements

Run the following two commands.

cp host_vars/localhost.yml.example host_vars/localhost.yml
cp host_vars/remote.yml.example host_vars/remote.yml

Then open host_vars/localhost.yaml and replace the fields with "**PLEASE FILL IN**".

Head to host_vars/remote.yaml and fill in with your git details and repos you want to check out.

READY, SET, GO! 💨

After entering the following command, the following things will happen:

Local box
- additional pip packages will be installed (needed for the aws tasks)
- a key pair will be generated and the public part will be uploaded on AWS and Github
Remote box
- box set up with as t2.micro with 20GB block storage
- security group set up with ports 22 and 80 accessible from anywhere
- static ip EIP set up
Local box
- ssh_config file with connection details saved locally - this will included along the rest of the ssh configuration
Local box
- install packages like git, tmux, docker, nvm
- install VSCode tmux shell helper script
- git clone repositories
```
./run.sh
```

Connect to box

Open the "command palette" (Cmd + Shift + P)
Select "Connect to host"
Select "remote-dev-box"

Boom 💥 you're in!

If you prefer regular ssh, just run ./ssh.sh

lewiswill / remote-dev-box