Setup a Development Environment#

Now that you have a development box it’s time to setup a development environment. A development environment is a workspace where you edit files, execute commands and do the day-to-day work of a cloud engineer. In a bygone era just having a shell and vim would have counted as a development environment, but now it’s better to have access to more task automation and a modern editor. To complete this milestone you will connect vscode to your devbox and enable SSH agent forwarding so that your dev box can use your SSH keys. This will enable you to do the rest of the work in the class.

Labs#

If you’re on Mac or Windows you should read and follow the labs below. If you use Linux on your desktop the SSH agent is already started for you and you can skip these. I will not be able to demonstrate them because I use Linux on my desktop.

Error

Can’t get SSH agent working or using a classroom computer?

If you’re having trouble with SSH agent an alternative is to copy your public and private key to your VM. Simply use your connected vscode to edit ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 and ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub files to match those on your local computer. After that you will be able to use that key for GitHub, which is required for the rest of the class.

In class I demonstrated the following:

Project Documentation#

To meet the project requirements for this week you have to accomplish the following tasks:

  1. Enable your dev box to use your SSH keys. Document one of:

    1. Enable SSH forwarding on your home machine

    2. Copying your SSH keys to your devbox

  2. Connect vscode to your devbox

  3. Create a service account and attach it to your devbox

You should fully document your steps and post your documentation to the class discussion forum. After you’ve posted you will be able to see other’s documentation and make changes to your own. Your documentation must include the following items:

  1. A summary of each step you took to complete the required tasks

  2. The identity of the service account you created (e.g. someserviceaccount@blah.blah.blah)

  3. A screenshot of you running the gcloud compute instances list command on your devbox