Setup VS Code for remote development

Well in order to setup a remote environment, you need a DigitalOcean account, you can use my referral code below to get $100 for 60 days just to try these things out 👇

After you're done creating an account, let's move to the next step

Creating a Droplet

On the left menu, click on the Droplet button
Create a new droplet by clicking on the "Create Droplet" buton
Choose a distro of your flavour (I choose Ubuntu for ease of use) and select your desired specs
Select the datacenter region closest to you for better latency

For Authentication, choose SSH keys and click on the "New SSH Key" button below

Use the command ssh-keygen to generate an SSH key, and the file would be stored under ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub (for Mac and Linux) and C:\<user_name>\.ssh\id_rsa.pub (for Windows)

NOTE: The command ssh-keygen might not work on Windows CMD or Powershell, use Git Bash

Finally, click on "Create Droplet" at the bottom and wait for a few minutes for it to spin up

Connecting to droplet via SSH

Copy the IP address
Go to your terminal, and type 👉 ssh root@<IP_ADDRESS>
- Example 👉 ssh [email protected]
Once inside the Droplet, create a new sudo user
- Create a new user 👉 adduser vscode
- Add it to sudo group 👉 usermod -aG sudo vscode
- Login as the user 👉 su - vscode
- Create a new ssh directory 👉 mkdir ~/.ssh
- Create a new file inside it 👉 touch ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
- Copy the contents of id_rsa.pub file, present on your local PC and paste it inside the authorized_keys file you created on your Droplet
  - To paste the contents into authorized_keys file, you can use any cli based text editor, nano example below 👇
  - Press Ctrl-X, then Y and then Enter to save the file
- [OPTIONAL] Type chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys to make sure other users don't access this file
Press Ctrl-D twice to logout from the Droplet and test ssh connection of this new user vscode
Type ssh vscode@<IP_ADDRESS> to connect to your Droplet, but now as the user vscode instead of root