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Remote development over SSH

This tutorial walks you through creating and connecting to a virtual machine (VM) on Azure using the Visual Studio Code Remote - SSH extension. You'll create a Node.js Express web app to show how you can edit and debug on a remote machine with VS Code just like you could if the source code was local.

Note: Your Linux VM can be hosted anywhere - on your local host, on premise, in Azure, or in any other cloud, as long as the chosen Linux distribution meets these prerequisites.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need to have done the following steps:

Install an OpenSSH compatible SSH client (PuTTY is not supported).
Install Visual Studio Code.
Have an Azure subscription (If you don't have an Azure subscription, create a free account before you begin).

Install the extension

The Remote - SSH extension is used to connect to SSH hosts.

Install the Remote - SSH extension

[Remote - SSH extension]

Remote - SSH

With the Remote - SSH extension installed, you will see a new Status bar item at the far left.

[Remote Status bar item]

The Remote Status bar item can quickly show you in which context VS Code is running (local or remote) and clicking on the item will bring up the Remote - SSH commands.

[Remote - SSH commands]

Create a virtual machine

If you don't have an existing Linux virtual machine, you can create a new VM through the Azure portal. In the Azure portal, search for "Virtual Machines", and choose Add. From there, you can select your Azure subscription and create a new resource group, if you don't already have one.

Note: In this tutorial, we are using Azure, but your Linux VM can be hosted anywhere, as long as the Linux distribution meets these prerequisites.

[Create a virtual machine]

Now you can specify details of your VM, such as the name, the size, and the base image. Choose Ubuntu Server 18.04 LTS for this example, but you can choose recent versions of other Linux distros and look at VS Code's supported SSH servers.

[Virtual machine instance details]

Set up SSH

There are several authentication methods into a VM, including an SSH public/private key pair or a username and password. We recommend using key-based authentication (if you use a username/password, you'll be prompted to enter your credentials more than once by the extension). If you're on Windows and have already created keys using PuttyGen, you can reuse them.

Create an SSH key

If you don't have an SSH key pair, open a bash shell or the command line and type in:

sudo apt-get update
curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_lts.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt-get install -y nodejs

You can verify the installations by running:

sudo npm install -g express-generator

The -g switch installs the Express Generator globally on your machine so that you can run it from anywhere.

Create a new application

You can now create a new Express application called myExpressApp by running:

cd myExpressApp
npm install

Run the application

Last, let's ensure that the application runs. From the terminal, start the application using the npm start command to start the server.

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