CS:APP Dev Env

A tool for provisioning and managing cloud dev environments. This project is intended to be used for problems, examples, and exploration while working through Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective. It may be extended for other use cases in the future.

Goals of this project are to be:

Easy to use
Reasonably secure
Inexpensive

The dev environment is currently a Linux (Ubuntu) x86_64 EC2 instance.

The instance includes:

gcc, make, and binutils (via build-essential)
gdb
Rust
Neovim with some configuration.

Prerequisites

This project uses the Terraform CLI and AWS to provision dev environments. To create an environment, you'll need to have the Terraform CLI and AWS CLI installed locally.

You can also optionally use direnv for local env var management.

For convenience this project includes a .tool-versions for installation via asdf.

The environment will be provisioned in AWS, so you'll also need to have an AWS account.

Usage

Configuration

First, make sure that your AWS credentials are available in your env.

For example (using a .envrc with direnv):

export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=anaccesskey
export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=asecretkey

You'll also need to have an existing SSH key pair in AWS to use to access the dev env. The docs for creating a key pair in AWS are here.

You can specify the name of the key to use either in a terraform.tfvars file or in your env.

Environment example:

export TF_VAR_aws_ssh_key_name=yourkeyname

terraform.tfvars example:

aws_ssh_key_name = "yourkeyname"

Scripts

Managing the environment happens via scripts that can be found in the bin directory.

The scripts are:

create: creates the environment
- Example usage: ./bin/create
connect: connects to the environment via SSH
- Example usage: ./bin/connect
destroy: destroys the environment
- Example usage: ./bin/destroy
recreate: recreates (destroys and then creates) the environment
- Example usage: ./bin/recreate

Roadmap/To Investigate

Potential features to explore. These may or may not actually be added depening on effort and whether or not the solution would line up with the project's goals.