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

1. Install the Pypi modules listed in requirements.txt

pip install -r requirements.txt

2. Install pre-commit hooks:

pre-commit install

Local

3. Recreate WARP's development environment locally:

make apply

GCP

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

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

5. Build WARP Box as a GCE VM image

make box-gcp

6. 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

1. Packer triggers a build of the development environment VM image, known as WARP Box, on a Cloud Provider (currently Google Cloud).
2. 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.
3. The Terraform module spins up WARP VM: a Cloud VM using WARP Box as a boot disk on the Cloud Provider.
4. 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.