Solution without port forwarding?

[md27182]

I don't have much experience with networking, but I've been following the setup guide the best I can for my use case.

Instead of using a Google Cloud server, I would like to run code-server on a desktop machine at my office. I would like to be able to access it from anywhere using a browser.

I'm not sure what the rules are for port forwarding at my office and the security risks are a bit intimidating, so I wanted to see if there was a way to set this up without using port forwarding. Will the Let's Encrypt + Caddy/NGINX method in the guide achieve this or will that only work for Google Cloud instances?

It seems like what I want to do is definitely possible with NGROK, but the latency is making me look for another option.

I also found this blog post which looks promising, but I'm way out of my depth at this point and would appreciate some guidance!

[md27182]

Update: I just set up NGROK and it actually works just fine, the latency isn't an issue!

[bpmct]

The connection goes through our servers, which are geographically distributed. So strange about that error. @sreya may be able to help debug this if it happens again.

[md27182]

Sounds good thanks for your help! One last question - is this feature going to eventually become the $35/month paid service on coder.com, or will it remain free?

[bpmct]

This will remain free. The $35/mo plan relates to Coder, our dev platform for teams.

The source code for the --link server is open source, so if we ever decide to stop supporting it, another instance could be hosted: https://github.com/cdr/cloud-agent

[md27182]

Sweet! Okay last, last question - is there a way to get this --link flag added to the default systemd service that was created when I installed code-server?

[bpmct]

Yep, it can be done. The easiest way is to edit your code-server config and add to ~/.config/code-server.config.yaml:

link: true

You could also edit the systemd service definition and add the --link flag

If it is a new machine, you will have to use journalctl or something to get the systemd logs for the OAuth URL the first time. I also created deploy-code-server that adds code-server with link to any Ubuntu VM and forwards port 80 to the --link URL, so there's no need to SSH in or view logs.