A tool to manage on-demand cloud development environments within Digital Ocean.
Sometimes you might have a very limited internet bandwidth, but you still need to do the work; you still need to develop that feature for a software, which has a bunch of NPM dependencies, and runs development environment in a multi-docker container setup.
Or sometimes you might want to offload your old MacBook that has only 16GB of RAM, and running your local stack together with Slack, Spotify, Google Meet, Linear, Notion, Discord, VSCode, and other electron apps makes it unbearably slow.
Or maybe the only thing you have with you is an iPad with an SSH client, but you desperately need to fix that bug.
Fear no more. With this tool all bandwidth and computing power you need is for a tiny SSH window to a Digital Ocean droplet.
This tool manages configuration for all your development environments and lets you start and stop them whenever you need them.
A development environment consists of two parts: a volume and a machine. Volume is a block storage that keeps your data, code, configuration, and even some software safe between machine restarts. Machine is a droplet, that provides you with CPU and RAM resources.
Since computing resources are quite expensive, we shut machines down when we don’t need them anymore. While we keep volumes, so we don’t need to reconfigure our development environment again and again every time.
Thanks to the magic of the SSH Agent and its forwarding, in the cloud dev workspace you still have your access everywhere you already have it from your laptop, including GitHub.
- A Digital Ocean account (get one here https://www.digitalocean.com if you still don’t have it)
- A Digital Ocean API key to manage droplets and volumes through their API (get one here https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/api/tokens)
- A configured SSH key in Digital Ocean (here https://cloud.digitalocean.com/account/security)
- Some money to pay for volume gigabytes and droplet hours
- This tool
- Optional: A configured firewall in Digital Ocean allowing only SSH access (because you don't want script-kiddies messing with your dev environment)
- Python 3.11 (pyenv is a convenient option)
- Poetry
poetry installinside the project directory- Make sure
bin/dowis on your$PATH
- Configure it
% dow config token XXXXXXXXXXX [+] Token updated % dow config region blah [+] Region updated % dow config firewalls add fbcb7f36-334b-42db-8fb0-0d3f9ffe6277 [+] Firewall fbcb7f36-334b-42db-8fb0-0d3f9ffe6277 added - Create a volume
% dow volumes create --name dev --size 20 --fs-type xfs POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/volumes [+] Created volume 'dev' % dow volumes list GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/volumes {} name size_gigabytes fs_type dev 20 xfs - Create a machine
% dow machines create \ --name dev \ --size c-8 \ --image debian-11-x64 \ --volume dev \ --username misha \ --swapsize 20 [+] Created machine dev % dow machines list GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets {} name size image volume username swapsize status ip ports dev c-8 debian-11-x64 dev misha 20 CONFIG [] - Configure forwarded ports
% dow machines ports add --machine dev --port 5432 [+] Added port '5432' to machine 'dev' - Start the machine
% dow machines start dev GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets {'name': 'dev'} GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/volumes {'name': 'dev'} [+] Using volume 'dev' (362194ac-9c49-43ac-ad03-016c2b3a8d37) GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/account/keys {} [+] Using SSH keys: ['mbp'] POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets [+] Created droplet 111111111 POST https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/firewalls/362194ac-9c49-43ac-ad03-016c2b3a8d37/droplets GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets/111111111 {} [+] Status 'new', waiting... GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets/111111111 {} [+] Status 'new', waiting... GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets/111111111 {} [+] Status 'active', continuing GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets/111111111 {} [+] Got IP address: XX.XXX.XXX.XX [+] Waiting for SSH to become available at XX.XXX.XXX.XX [+] Waiting for install log to be ready [+] Still waiting... [+] Waiting for machine init to complete [+] [2023-07-29 16:23:23] apt update [+] [2023-07-29 16:23:33] installing basic stuff [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:17] generating locale [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:19] creating user [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:19] mounting volume [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:19] creating swapfile [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:56] symlinking home [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:56] symlink /var/lib/docker [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:56] changing user's shell to zsh [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:56] preparing to install docker [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:56] apt update [+] [2023-07-29 16:24:58] installing docker [+] [2023-07-29 16:25:17] adding user to docker group [+] [2023-07-29 16:25:17] enabling byobu [+] [2023-07-29 16:25:17] configuring authorized keys [+] [2023-07-29 16:25:17] configuring byobu [+] [2023-07-29 16:25:17] starting inactivity check [+] Machine 'dev' is ready GET https://api.digitalocean.com/v2/droplets {'name': 'dev'} [+] To connect: ssh dev-dow - Connect
% ssh dev-dow
Machines don’t shutdown automatically when idling (yet), so if you want to save some costs, remember to shut them down when you don’t need them anymore.
- Create named volumes of different sizes, which you can attach to machines
- Create and store configuration of as many cloud development environments as you need locally in a dotfile in TOML format
- Reuse SSH keys from your Digital Ocean account, so you can SSH into machines without extra hassle
- Configure your preferred username
- Configure port forwarding per machine
- Pre-configured on a machine:
- Docker with compose- and buildx plugins
- Mount-bind of the whole
/hometo your attached volume- This persists your work,
- And lets you keep whatever you installed with Linuxbrew
- Symlinked
/var/lib/dockerto your attached volume, so you keep docker cache and running containers between machine restarts - Adding entries to your
~/.ssh/configfor easier access
- Supporting images other than
debian-11-x64due to hardcoded OS-specific init script - Shutting down machines when idling to save costs