Because:

• I work on a Chromebook (it's generally awesome, except for local development)
• Running a (premptable) big server for even 40 hours a month is much cheaper than buying a good dev workstation
• It forces me to make things as simple as possible, which means lower barriers to entry to anyone who wants to help.

This is not an official Google product.

GCE Ubuntu 16 comes with curl and git and bash. If you don't have those, add them.

Preemptable instances habe ephemeral external IPs - the IP goes away when the instance is shut down.

To make it easier to use, use a dynamic DNS service - like DuckDNS (which is free).

To setup DuckDNS - get the Curl URL from your DuckDNS page, and put the hostname and the token in /etc/duckdns.env. It should look like this, but with your values:

DUCKDNS_HOSTNAME=myserver
DUCKDNS_TOKEN=01234567-89ab-cdef-0123-456789abcdef

Then set up the service:

sudo cp duckdns.service /etc/systemd/system
sudo systemctl enable duckdns.service

In case you want to check the IP from the machine itself:

curl http://metadata/computeMetadata/v1/instance/network-interfaces/0/access-configs/0/external-ip -H "Metadata-Flavor: Google"

Install the Docker repos and Docker, which are generally much more recent than the Ubuntu maintained docker.io package:

sudo apt-get -y install \
  apt-transport-https \
  ca-certificates;
curl -fsSL https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu/gpg | sudo apt-key add - ;
sudo add-apt-repository \
       "deb [arch=amd64] https://download.docker.com/linux/ubuntu \
       $(lsb_release -cs) \
       stable";
sudo apt-get update;
sudo apt-get -y install docker-ce;
sudo service docker restart;

Add your user to the docker group - makes life easyier:

sudo gpasswd -a ${USER} docker

Thin logout and log back in.

A script to just get the latest non-rc version of docker-compose:

./get-dc.sh

Because you're on GCE (just guessing...):

ssh-keygen -t rsa -C "${USER}@gmail.com" -b 4096
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Add the public SSH key to your code repo of choice.

Let git know who you are:

git config --global user.email "your-email-addresss-here"
git config --global user.name "your-name-here"

If you want to automatically shutdown the server instance so you're not charged for time you're not using:

sudo cp auto_shutdown /etc/init.d
cd /etc/rc3.d
sudo ln -s /etc/init.d/auto_shutdown S99auto_shutdown