This article is the 2nd day of the Advent Calendar 2021 of Wazaterm, an online Linux terminal for hackers.

Wazaterm Features

If you want to access from various platforms, you can use VPS+SSH, but Wazaterm has the following advantages over VPS+SSH.

CPU and memory can be freely selected

You can freely choose the CPU and memory of the instance running Terminal, so you can use different machine power for different projects. For example, you can use 8G of memory and 2 CPU cores for a Rails project for the last 3 months. In the other project, use less memory for a node. Note that when you change the specs, you have to shut down the instance and start it up again, which takes a little time (about 5+ minutes).

SSH is available 🙌

With SSH, you can do almost anything: not only terminal use, but also secure tunneling with port forwarding, SCP, SFTP, and even mount with SSH. Local port forwarding and drive mounting are essential to developing in a local environment. I'll explain how to do this later.

You have root privileges

The OS is Ubuntu, so you can use sudo apt install to install packages and tweak /etc/systemd. (It's your own responsibility if you can't boot). This is necessary for normal development, such as adding imageMagic libraries.

Suspend, Resume can be automated

You can save money by suspending instances when not in use (and at the same time reduce carbon dioxide emissions, so it's earth-friendly!). Suspend/Resume can take about 30~seconds, depending on the size of the memory. This waiting time is a bit stressful, so I made it possible to automate it with a webhook, and by combining it with an iOS shortcut app, you can make it so that I can resume terminal when I arrive at the office and suspend the terminal when it's time to go home. This way, you can start working without waiting.

Take backups

You can back up your entire OS. You can back up your entire OS, even if you rm -rf /. （This is an optional feature, so please use it only if you need it)

What do you think? Can't wait to use it? I'll explain how to start tomorrow.