Using an Altivox VM for remote development

I've been coding for a few years, primarily with web frameworks such as Next.js, and recently I've been trying to learn Rust. My daily driver is a ThinkPad which I often bring around to code on the go.

However, the battery often drains really quickly when I work on my projects, as well as it not being very fast when compiling Rust builds. When remembering about GitHub Codespaces, I thought "why not do cloud dev?" After all, I've got a pretty beefy dedicated server already!

Wthout further ado, I'll be sharing a few different tools that you can use for remote development. I personally just use VS Code, but if you are a user of a different IDE or simply don't like to use proprietary software (the official VSC build's not licensed under MIT), there's various different options to choose from.

VS Code

When using VS Code, there's an extension you can install called Remote - SSH. It's unavailable with VSCodium due to licensing restrictions.

The process isn't that difficult. Once you've installed the extension, the button "Connect to..." should become available on the welcome page (yes I use light mode fight me) and you can then proceed to put in your user and server's hostname. I assume that you've already set up your server nicely.

After this, proceed to select either "Connect to Host" to create a new window or "Connect Current Window to Host". Type in your login details and connect, or add it as a new SSH host so you can navigate to it without having to type in your connection details over and over.

I personally prefer to use dev containers along with this to isolate my projects' dependencies but it's not required.

DevPod

DevPod, built by Loft is an alternative to GitHub Codespaces which does also have first-class support for the VSCode devcontainer specification, supporting deployment to Kubernetes clusters, cloud providers, and more (though this guide will only be covering the use case of a VM)

One really good thing about DevPod is that you can use it with a ton of different IDEs, text editors, et cetera. You don't even need to choose one of the supported IDEs to use it: you can simply SSH into the newly created container once it's created.

After installing DevPod, you'll want to create a workspace. On your first workspace creation, it'll ask you to configure a provider. Select SSH and type in your auth details.

Now choose a repository, folder or Docker image. If you have a private git repository, DevPod will use the git credentials manager to get access. Once you're done, you can remote SSH into it using VSCodium (Open Remote - SSH).