Motivations

I wanted a seamless way to switch between devices while coding (macbookpro / imac / ipad).

• VSCode offers a remote SSH feature which allows your local VScode editor to remotely edit code, run terminals ... which is perfect for computers.

• coder.com also offers a feature to make a full featured VSCode environment run in your browser or as a PWA (which can be helpful from an iPad)

Components

This project will help at setting up a ubuntu VPS with :

• Docker
• code-server
• elixir (with asdf)
• chromedriver
• node (with nvm)
• postgresql
• nginx as a reverse proxy in front of code-server, webpack and your project
• various shell things such as ohmyzsh, autojump, tmux or direnv

Setup

Guidelines to provision a development server with Ansible

• first, provision a VPS from any cloud vendor (I use a Digital Ocean $40/mo VPS with Ubuntu 18.04)

• make sure you can root ssh to your newly created VPS

• register following domain names all set with A record to your VPS IP

  • ssh.mydomain.com used by you or ansible to ssh to your VPS
  • vscode.mydomain.com to access code-server web interface
  • webpack.mydomain.com to reach webpack dev server, that will hot render assets
  • myproject.mydomain.com to reach your dev server

• locally install ansible: brew install ansible.

• create an ansible config file in ~/.ansible.cfg.

  [defaults]
  inventory = ~/.ansible/hosts
  

• create an ansible inventory in ~/.ansible/hosts - create an ansible inventory in ~/.ansible/hosts.

  ssh.mydomain.com
  

• copy variables/all.template.yml to variables/all.yml and change variables to your convenience.

• run ansible-playbook playbook.yml.