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Cindy Le
Cindy Le

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Remote Development using SSH with Visual Studio Code on an AWS EC2 instance

#aws #cloud #docker #devops

The following will show you how to create and connect to a virtual machine (VM) on AWS using the Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH extension. You'll be able to run Telescope in development on a remote machine with VS Code just like if the source code was local. This documentation is based on Remote development over SSH

Telescope is a tool for tracking blogs around Seneca's open source develop. The application itself has many microservices that use Docker containers and are composed together using Docker-Compose. You can find the GitHub repo here

Telescope Tech Stack

  • Next.js
  • Material UI
  • Node.js
  • Elasticsearch
  • Redis
  • Traefik
  • Firebase
  • Jest

Telescope Microservices

  • Auth
  • Feed-Discovery
  • Image
  • Parser
  • Planet
  • Posts
  • Search
  • Status
  • Users

Disclaimer: The EC2 instance used in this guide is not within AWS's Free-Tier so please see EC2 Pricing to see if you're comfortable with these costs. Running Docker in development is CPU intensive so these are the EC2 instances I recommend:

  • Minimum: t2.medium (4 GiB RAM + 2 vCPU)
  • Recommended: t2.large (8 GiB RAM + 2 vCPU)

Summary of Pricing:

  • t2.medium costs \$0.0464 per hour
  • t2.large costs \$0.0928 per hour
  • 30GB Amazon Elastic Block Storage (EBS) costs \$3 per month

Cost Estimate Per Month:

t2.medium t2.large
Cost per hour \$0.0464 \$0.0928
Hours per day 8 8
Days per month 30 30
Sub-total \$11.14 \$22.27
30GB EBS Volume \$3 \$3
Total \$14.14 \$25.27

Prerequisites:

  • Download and install Visual Studio Code
  • Install the Remote - SSH extension
  • Create an AWS Account. You can watch this part of the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner course on creating an account if you need help.
  • Create an IAM user with administrative privileges. You will need your AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
  • Sign into your AWS Account using your IAM user

Create your virtual machine (AWS EC2):

  1. In the upper-right hand corner of your AWS Management Console, select US East (Ohio) us-east-2 as your Region
  2. In the upper-left hand corner of your AWS Management Console, click on Services. This will bring up a list of AWS Services, search for EC2
  3. Click on Launch instances
  • Step 1 - Choose an Amazon Machine Image (AMI): Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS (HVM), SSD Volume Type
  • Step 2 - Choose an Instance Type: t2.medium
  • Step 3 - Configure Instance Details: Accept the defaults and proceed to the next step
  • Step 4 - Add Storage: Change the Size (GiB) from 8 to 20
  • Step 5 - Add Tags: No tags are needed. Proceed to the next step.

  • Step 6 - Configure Security Group:

    • Assign a security group: Create a new security group
    • Security group name: telescope-sg
    • Add the following Rules:
    • SSH for your IP address
    • Type: SSH
    • Protocol: TCP
    • Port Range: 22
    • Source: My IP (When you select this from the dropdown menu, it will automatically put <your-ip-address>/32 in the field. For example 76.72.29.150/32)
    • Open port 3000 for your IP address
    • Type: Custom TCP
    • Protocol: TCP
    • Port Range: 3000
    • Source: My IP
    • Open port 8000 for your IP address
    • Type: Custom TCP
    • Protocol: TCP
    • Port Range: 8000
    • Source: My IP
    • Open port 8000 for your IP address
    • Type: Custom TCP
    • Protocol: TCP
    • Port Range: 8443
    • Source: My IP

  1. Click on Review and Launch. You will get a warning: Your instance configuration is not eligible for the free usage tier, this is because we're using a t2.medium instance type.
  2. Click on Launch
  3. In the pop-up, choose Create a new key pair
  • Key pair type: RSA
  • Key pair name: telescope-dev-key
  1. Click on Download Key Pair
  2. If you're using Windows, save the file in the .ssh directory in your user profile folder (for example C:/Users/cindy/.ssh/)
  3. Click on Launch Instances

It will take a few minutes for AWS to launch your new EC2 instance.

  1. Once your EC2 instance has been launched, you should name it something meaningful like Telescope-Dev and you can find your EC2 instance's public IPv4 address. Make note of this IP address.

Connect using SSH

  1. Open up Visual Studio Code
  2. Click on the Open a Remote Window icon at the bottom left-hand corner of the window
  3. Select Connect to Host
  4. Select Configure SSH Hosts...

  5. This will open up a config file in Visual Studio Code. If you're using Windows, it'll be something like C:/Users/cindy/.ssh/config

  6. Edit the config file with the following:

Host aws-ec2
    HostName <your-ec2-ip-address>
    User ubuntu
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/telescope-dev-key.pem
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  1. Save the file
  2. When you click on the Open a Remote Window icon at the bottom left-hand corner again and choose Connect to Host, you will see aws-ec2 listed.
  3. Select aws-ec2 and a new Visual Studio Code window will open.
  4. You will see "aws-ec2" has fingerprint "SHA256:xxx" and Are you sure you want to continue?. Click on Continue. Then You should see that you're connected!

Setting up your AWS credentials

  1. Open up a terminal in Visual Studio Code (hotkey on Windows: Ctrl + backtick). You should see that you're logged in as something like ubuntu@ip-172.31.23.4.

  2. Install unzip. We will need this to install the AWS CLI

$ sudo apt install unzip
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  1. Install the latest version of the AWS CLI 
$ curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip
sudo ./aws/install
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  1. Verify the AWS CLI installation 
$ aws --version

aws-cli/2.3.0 Python/3.8.8 Linux/5.4.0-1045-aws exe/x86_64.ubuntu.20 prompt/off
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  1. Remove the awscliv2.zip file and aws directory 
rm awscliv2.zip
rm -rf aws
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  1. Configure your AWS credentials 
aws configure
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  1. Currently, everything is set as None so enter your credentials for your AWS IAM user. 
AWS Access Key ID [None]: ****************764G
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: ****************qBbe
Default region name [None]: us-east-2
Default output format [None]:
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Installing Docker and Docker-Compose

Install Docker Engine - Community Edition

  1. Update the apt package index: 
sudo apt-get update
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  1. Install packages to allow apt to use a repository over HTTPS: 
sudo apt-get install \
    ca-certificates \
    curl \
    gnupg \
    lsb-release
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  1. Add Docker’s official GPG key: 
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg
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  1. Use the following command to set up the stable repository: 
echo \
  "deb [arch=$(dpkg --print-architecture) signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/docker-archive-keyring.gpg] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
  $(lsb_release -cs) stable" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/docker.list > /dev/null
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  1. Update the apt package index again: 
sudo apt-get update
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  1. Install the latest version of Docker Engine community: 
sudo apt-get install docker-ce docker-ce-cli containerd.io
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  1. Add your user to the Docker group (source): 
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
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  1. Activate the changes to groupss 
newgrp docker
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  1. Now run docker as a service on your machine, on startup:
  • Enable docker on startup: sudo systemctl enable docker
  • Disable docker on startup: sudo systemctl disable docker

Install Docker-Compose

  1. Run to download the current stable version of Docker-Compose: 
sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.29.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
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  1. Apply executable permissions to the downloaded file: 
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
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  1. Check installation using: 
$ docker-compose --version

docker-compose version 1.29.2, build 5becea4c
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Install Node.js and npm

  1. Install Node.js 16.x and npm 8.1 
$ curl -fsSL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_16.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs
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  1. Verify installation 
$ node -v
v16.12.0

$ npm -v
8.1.0
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Setting up the Telescope repository in AWS EC2:

  1. Clone the Telescope repository and name the remote upstream by entering 
git clone -o upstream https://github.com/Seneca-CDOT/telescope.git
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  1. Open the telescope directory and the entire Telescope files and folder structure should be visible to you!

  2. Set all the necessary environment variables in your env.remote file to contain your EC2 instance's public IPv4 address by executing the aws-ip.sh script

sh ./tools/aws-ip.sh
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If you did everything correctly, you've completed the environment setup!

Now to get started with development...

  1. Install all dependencies 
npm install
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  1. Start all Telescope services. This will take some time to complete 
docker-compose --env-file .env up -d
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  1. Start the Telescope development server on Port 3000 
npm start
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  1. Find your EC2 instance's public IPv4 
$ curl -s http://169.254.169.254/latest/meta-data/public-ipv4

35.174.16.133
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  1. Open <public-ip>:8000 browser tab to see Telescope running on a AWS Cloud9 environment!

  2. Open <public-ip>:3000/feeds in another browser tab to see all the feeds in the backend

  3. Open <public-ip>:8443/v1/<microservice-port> in another browser tab to see the microservices. For example 35.174.16.133:8443/v1/posts

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

How do I stop my docker containers? 

npm run services:stop
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How do I delete my docker containers? 

docker system prune -af --volumes
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I get Permission denied error when I run docker-compose --env-file .env up -d

Sometimes the Docker permissions aren't set properly when you first install Docker. You may need to reboot your VM or run

newgrp docker
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I can't open :8000 running, what could I be doing wrong?

  1. If you have a VPN on, turn it off and get your IP address by visiting http://checkip.amazonaws.com/ then allow your IP address to access the ports 3000 and 8000.

  2. AWS may change your EC2 instance IP address when you stop or restart your EC2 instance. One solution is to purchase an Elastic IP address to reserve the particular public IP address. However, you can just clean out the env.remote and .env files and run the ./tools/aws-ip.sh script again to set your new EC2 IP address in the appropriate environment variables. Just remember to use the new EC2 IP address in the browser as well.

I can't SSH into my EC2 instance

  1. Same reason as above, your EC2 instance IP address may change when you stop or restart your EC2 instance. So make sure your .ssh/config file has the correct HostName
  2. If your own IP address changes (for example, you changed internet providers or you moved to a new location with a different IP address), you need to update your inbound rules to allow your IP address to access port 22. Don't forget to allow access to port 3000 and 8000 as well.

How do I turn off my EC2 instance if I'm actively not using it?

There are a number of different methods to stop an EC2 instance:

  1. Manually turning it off using the AWS Console

  2. Creating a Cloudwatch alarm to stop your EC2 instance for you after some inactivity

    • Click on the + underneath Alarm status to start creating an alarm
    • Click on Create an alarm radio button
    • Set Alarm action to Stop
    • Set alarm to trigger if the CPU utilization of the EC2 instance has been less 25% for an hour

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