Coding in the Cloud - VSCode on OCI Free Tier

3 minutes read

Oracle Cloud recently started offering a free tier that gives you two micro VMs each with 1GB Ram and 1⁄8 OCPU (Looks like this results in 2 cores at ~2Ghz). I thought this would be a fun chance to checkout Code Server on my new iPad Pro for some mobile development. Code Server allows you to run Visual Studio Code through a web browser thus allowing you to run it from anywhere.

Getting The VM

After Oracle Announced a free tier, people swarmed to take advantage and thus capacity was quickly taken over. This paused my original intent down this path but recently I tried again and was able to snap a few VMs. If you get an error saying “No Host Capacity”, you’ll need to just try again another day.

The first trick is finding where you can get your free instances. Find this info by:

  1. Login to OCI Console
  2. Make sure you have the home region selected. (Top right)
  3. Click on the profile icon (Very top right corner) and select Tenancy:YourTenancy option
  4. Expand Compute and look for the line labeled “VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro”
  5. Note what Availability Domain (AD) is listed

Create your new VM as follows:

  1. Log in to the OCI Console
  2. Verify Region
  3. Menu (Top Left) -> Compute -> Instances
  4. Click Create Instance
  5. Fill out the form:
    • Name
    • Availability Domain (Pulled from the service limits above)
    • Shape: “VM.Standard.E2.1.Micro” (Note the Always Free label)
    • Assign a public IP
    • Add SSH Key
  6. Wait for it to provision
  7. Look at details page and note the Public IP
  8. Log in with something like ssh -i YOUR_SSH_KEY opc@PUBLIC_IP_OF_VM

Install Code Server

Now that you have a VM and can log in, you can pull and configure Code Server. First head over to Code Server Releases to find the latest and greatest. For my case I used 2.1665-vsc1.39.2.

  1. Basic install with the following 
    VERSION=2.1665-vsc1.39.2
wget https://github.com/cdr/code-server/releases/download/${VERSION}/code-server${VERISON}-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xvf code-server${VERSION}-linux-x86_64.tar.gz
ln -s code-server${VERSION}-linux-x86_64 code-server
  2. Configure Linus Firewall 
    sudo firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=8080/tcp
sudo firewall-cmd --reload
  3. Create Service File as /usr/lib/systemd/system/code-server.service 
    [Unit]
Description=Code Server IDE
After=network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=opc
EnvironmentFile=$HOME/.bash_profile
WorkingDirectory=$HOME/code
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=10
ExecStart=$HOME/code-server/code-server --cert $HOME/code-server/server.crt --cert-key $HOME/code-server/server.key $HOME/code

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
  4. Update your .bash_profile to specify a password for Code Server 
    PASSWORD=$PASSWORD
  5. Update your .bash_profile to fix SSL Issues downloading extentions 
    NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED=0
NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS=/etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
export NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS
export NODE_TLS_REJECT_UNAUTHORIZED
  6. Install Service 
    sudo systemctl start code-server
sudo systemctl enable code-server

Configure OCI Virtual Cloud Network (VCN)

In order to access the newly running code server, the port needs to be expoed in OCI’s VCN.

  1. Log in to the OCI Console
  2. Verify Region
  3. Menu (Top Left) -> Compute -> Instances
  4. Under Instance Information click the VirtualCloudNetwork-YYYYMMDD-HHMI link for the auto generated VCN
  5. Click the Public Subnet link
  6. Click the Default Security List
  7. Add Ingress Rule
    • Source CIDR: 0.0.0.0/0
    • Destination Port Range: 8080
  8. Save it

Log in and Enjoy!

If everything went smoothly you should now have Code Server running on a few OCI instance and available at http://YOUR_PUBLIC_IP:8080. It isn’t perfect and it isn’t a full blown Eclipse or Intelij but for things like writing some code and maintaining a blog it works quite well so far.