WARP

Code anywhere with an internet connection.

Introduction

WARP is portable, console based development environment which grew out the need to have a fully featured development environment ready to go, in the absence of my Physical Laptop. It is a full recreation of my Linux-based development environment in a Cloud VM, accessible via SSH or a Web Browser.

See design for architecture deep dive.

Features

Portable WARP is accessible from on any machine with a Web Browser or SSH client over the internet.
Consistency Each WARP instance has identical OS, packages & development tooling versions, ensuring the reproducibility of software written on it.
Cloud Native Designed to run in the cloud, WARP attains the ability to vertically scale based on development workload.
Lightweight Console-based by design, WARP avoids the overhead of a running a full blown Desktop environment.

Usage

Install the Pypi modules listed in requirements.txt

pip install -r requirements.txt

Install pre-commit hooks:

pre-commit install

Local

Recreate WARP's development environment locally:

make apply

GCP

Install Packer, Terraform
Edit project_id & zone in sources.pkr.hcl

  # google cloud build environment
  project_id  = "<GCP_PROJECT_ID>"
  zone        = "<ZONE>"

Build WARP Box as a GCE VM image

make box-gcp

Spin up WARP VM can on Google Cloud with included Terraform module:

module "warp_vm" {
  source = "github.com/mrzzy/warp//deploy/terraform/gcp_vm"
  # GCE metadata tags
  tags = [ <TAGS...> ]
  # secure web terminal with TLS
  web_tls_cert   = "<FULL CHAIN TLS CERT>"
  web_tls_key    = "<TLS PRIVATE KEY>"
  # ssh key authentication
  ssh_public_key = "<SSH PUBLIC KEY>"
}

Design

flowchart TB
    Packer -.-|triggers| play[[Ansible Playbook]] -->
|provisions| disk & laptop
    laptop[Laptop]

    tf[Terraform] -.-|deploys| disk -->|Boot| vm
    subgraph Cloud Provider
    direction LR
        disk[(WARP Box)]
        vm[VM]
    end

    term([Web Terminal]) &  ssh[SSH] & laptop -.-|access| user((Developer))
    subgraph vm [WARP VM]
        term
        ssh
    end

Packer triggers a build of the development environment VM image, known as WARP Box, on a Cloud Provider (currently Google Cloud).
An Ansible Playbook provisions WARP Box, installing packages & setting up tools.
- Ansible Playbook's idempotence lends itself well to provisioning physical hardware (eg. my Laptop).
- Being the single source of truth, Ansible ensures a consistent the development environment between WARP VM & physical hardware.
The Terraform module spins up WARP VM: a Cloud VM using WARP Box as a boot disk on the Cloud Provider.
The developer is able given ample options to access the development environment: WARP VM's Web Terminal or SSH interfaces, or when available, a physical laptop.

License

MIT.