Cardano Dev Box

Goals

Provision a SSH'able dev box in the cloud that is ready for Cardano development. This is one of the approaches as described in the guide Lovelace Academy - Getting Started - Running a Full Cardano Node.

Prerequisites

Azure CLI here
Terraform here
Visual Studio Code here and the Remote - SSH extension

Provisioning Azure Infrastructure

Azure CLI and Terraform are cross-platform tools so you can run the same commands across different CPU architectures and OS's.

Login with az login
If required, set your relevant subscription az account set --subscription ${YOUR_SUBSCRIPTION} (verify using az account show)
Create rg-vars.tfvars variable assignment file with your variables (see rg-vars.tf for reference). Example:

ssh-allowlist = ["20.86.228.51"] # Your local IP address
location = "northeurope"
resource-prefix = "lla-tn-eun-dev"
storage-prefix = "llatneuncdb"
cdbvm-username = "sa"
cdbvm-size = "Standard_D4as_v4"
cdbvm-nic-accelerated-networking = true
cdbvm-comp-name = "cdb"
# Tags
tag-stage = "testnet"

Run terraform init
Run terraform plan -var-file rg-vars.tfvars
If the output looks good, run terraform apply -var-file rg-vars.tfvars -auto-approve
This will take about 2 minutes to provision the whole infrastructure and spit out the output parameters sshpvk and cdbpip.
Save the SSH private key to a file using terraform output sshpvk > ssh.pem for Linux or terraform output sshpvk | Set-Content ssh.pem for Windows (powershell required)

SSH

Using the SSH key output from Terraform, ensure the relevant security rules are applied with the key prep scripts below.

SSH key prep (Linux)

chmod 400 ssh.pem

SSH key prep (Windows)

$path = "ssh.pem";
icacls.exe $path /reset;
icacls.exe $path /GRANT:R "$($env:USERNAME):(R)";
icacls.exe $path /inheritance:r;

SSH to Provisioned Azure Cloud VMs

ssh -i ssh.pem sa@20.54.24.228 where 20.54.24.228 should be replaced by the output from terraform output cdbpip and sa should be replaced by the value of variable cdbvm-username in rg-vars.tfvars.

Note: If you are using Windows, ensure you have OpenSSH

It is easy using the Remote - SSH extension in Visual Studio Code because it has both an integrated terminal and a full IDE for code manipulation.

Troubleshooting SSH issues

If you are unable to SSH to the newly created VM please check the SSH NSG ("${var.resource-prefix}-dev-nsg") rule in the Azure Portal and ensure your current IP is included. Don't forget to follow the steps in SSH key prep above too.

Running the full Cardano Node

You can simply run init.sh to set the VM up with all the required dependencies and the files required to run a full Cardano node. You can choose to switch between testnet (default) and mainnet networks by commenting/uncommenting the relevant segments. This file can also be used locally in a fresh Linux environment.

git clone https://github.com/LovelaceAcademy/CardanoDevBox.git
cd CardanoDevBox
bash init.sh