How to run Visual Studio Code in Google Cloud Shell

Did you know you can run Visual Studio Code in a browser? It’s so cool, it even works with extensions and all that. I’ll show you an example using github.com/cdr/code-server

• Go to console.cloud.google.com and open Cloud Shell

• Enable Boost Mode to make it faster

• Install code-server

curl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh

• Start the server

./code-server --no-auth --port 8080

Note that you don’t need authentication since the Google Cloud Shell proxy already handles that for you.

• Click on Web Preview -> Preview on port 8080

If you get a 404, remove ?authuser=0 from the url. So for example, just
https://8080-dot-YOURID-dot-devshell.appspot.com/
instead of
https://8080-dot-YOURID-dot-devshell.appspot.com/?authuser=0

That’s it, now you have an IDE running in your browser!