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Introduction to Cloud9 + Digital Ocean

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Before getting started to create accounts with Cloud9 and Digital Ocean.

Why Digital Ocean? Cloud9 offers virtual machines that you can purchase for a monthly fee. The price ranges start from free to $79.00 per month. The reason to use Digital Ocean over their environment is that it allows you to have a machine that is constantly running with an SSD drive giving you more control over the environment. This will allow for quick deployment of your application or live debugging with a staging setup since you have complete SSH access to that machine from the IDE.

The first step is to grab the SSH key that Cloud9 provides and let Digital Ocean know about this key. You can find the key at Link
Cloud Key

Digital ocean needs to know about this new key, you can input this key at Link
Cloud Key

Now it’s time to create a droplet. Start the setup at Link.
Cloud Key

From the selection choose Node. This will install NodeJS automatically.
Cloud Key

Make sure to select the right SSH key.
Cloud Key

IMPORTANT The next step is required in order to move on. You must upgrade your plan to one that allows for SSH support. Link
Cloud Key

Creating a workspace requires that it knows about the development machine. This can be accomplished by clicking on the link provided.
Cloud Key

Set up the values for the workspace. Here’s what each of the values means:

  • Hostname: the domain name or IP address of the machine running your SSH server.
  • Username: your username for the SSH server (might be root or something else).
  • Node.js Binary Path: the location of your Node.js binary. If you’re not sure where it is, you can always let Cloud9 guess it for you. Otherwise, on your server, type which node, to see the full path.
  • Initial path: this is an optional parameter. You can set it as an absolute (starts with /) path. Otherwise, it’ll be set to a relative path, and Cloud9 assumes that you want to start from the folder your SSH server leaves you with after login (usually the home or default folder).
  • Port: this is an optional parameter. Cloud9 will automatically try to connect to port 22.

Cloud Key

Once the workspace is created, you must run a script to initiate the workspace.
Cloud Key

That’s all! Now you should have a working cloud setup to start coding with. If for whatever reason you need to troubleshoot the setup, please use the following resource:

Modern HTML5 Text Editors, for example, Atom and Brackets support the ability to be hosted on a remote machine and be used through a web browser.