hcloud devgate

Notes:

• This is not an official Hetzner Cloud project
• This is my personal development setup and highly opinionated. It does currently only contain configurations for my own use-cases (pull requests welcome though)
• This is my first terraform project so you might not find the optimal solution for all aspects of terraform here

What is this?

The devgate is a Terraform configuration to launch a hetzner cloud instance configured to be used as a remote development machine, especially with VSCode remote tools in mind.

Why?

Devgate

The experience I made when trying out or working with different languages was that I was actively cluttering my machine with different tools which will set up environments each for their own language. This filled my home repository and added a lot of entries to my .zshrc. On top of that, if I want to keep going on a different machine, like at home or work I will have to install all of the tooling again.

The best solution for this problem was to just create a remote machine that I can pollute with dependencies and ssh into for development with vim or any other command line based tools.

Microsoft releasing their VSCode Remote Development Plugins sealed the deal for the devgate as I can use a fully featured IDE on a remote machine.

Terraform

Terraform was mainly chosen to be able to save some money. Instead of running a powerful CX51 for an entire month, I am able to boot up my development machine when I need it and destroy it when I am done.

How to use

Prerequisites

• terraform >= 0.12
• Hetzner Cloud project with a generated API-Key
• A Floating IP in your Hetzner Cloud project
• A Volume in your Hetzner Cloud project
• An ssh-keypair that will be used by the user on the devgate for e.g. pushing to GitHub
• (optional) VSCode with Remote Development extension pack

Configuration

Required

1. Remove the .example suffix from terraform.tfvars.example
2. Replace the config placeholders with your preferences
3. Copy the pre-generated ssh-keypair into the .ssh directory of this repository

Quality of life

1. Edit your ~/.ssh/config to contain

   Host devgate
       StrictHostKeyChecking no
       UserKnownHostsFile=/dev/null
       HostName <your_floating_ip>
       User <your_user_name>
       IdentityFile <ssh_key_to_authenticate_with>
   

   Disabling StrictHostKeyChecking will allow you to log into the devgate without receiving a warning from ssh as we are expecting the server behind the IP to be changing.
2. If using VSCode, add .vscode/extensions.json to your project and fill it with the extension you want to use in that project. When opening the project with VSCode it will prompt you to install the extensions (on the remote machine) which will save you some time

Usage

There are not many things to say about the usage, apart from that it is expected that projects are created in the volume, for ease of use this template creates a softlink to the volume in your home directory with the name projects.