Getting started with VS CODE remote development

Let’s say you have a GPU virtual instance on the cloud or a physical machine which is headless, there are several options like remote desktop or Jupyter Notebook which can provide you with desktop-like development experience, however, VS CODE remote development extension can be more flexible than Jupyter notebook and more responsive than remote desktop. I will show you step by step how to set up it up on Windows.

Start OpenSSH service

First, let’s make sure you have set up SSH on your server, most likely your online server instance will have OpenSSH server preconfigured, the command below can check whether it is running.

service sshd status

If you see something like this, you are good to go, otherwise, install or start the OpenSSH server

● ssh.service - OpenBSD Secure Shell server
 Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/ssh.service; enabled; vendor preset: enabled)
 Active: active (running) since Tue 2019-09-17 19:58:43 CST; 4 days ago
 Main PID: 600 (sshd)
 Tasks: 1 (limit: 1109)
 CGroup: /system.slice/ssh.service
 └─600 /usr/sbin/sshd -D

For the Ubuntu system, you can install OpenSSH server and optionally change the default 22 port like this

sudo apt-get install openssh-server
# Optionally change…