cloud-shell

This is tooling to provide a fast and convenient way to spin up a shell in the cloud.

Features

• Custom shell image with Packer and Ansible
• Easily customise the image with additional Ansible Galaxy roles
• Edit files on the remote machine using rmate for TextMate 2
• Forward local ssh key for use with git

Build

The image must first be built and stored in the desired GCP zone.

Prerequisites:

• gcloud must be installed and set to an account with the roles/owner role.
• Ansible must be installed. See here for full installation instructions.
  • Mac OSX: brew install ansible

Build the image:

1. Edit cloud-shell.cfg and set your GCP project ID and zone. Other configuration is optional.

   PROJECT_ID="cloud-shell-215704"
   ZONE="asia-northeast1-a"

2. Execute the following script to create a Google Cloud service account for Packer. It will be created with the compute.instanceAdmin.v1 and iam.serviceAccountUser roles.

   ./create_packer_service_account.sh

3. (Optional) Customise the shell image by, for example, adding Ansible Galaxy roles.

4. Prepare the required ansible roles locally.

   ansible-galaxy install -r requirements.yml

5. Build and store the image in GCP.

   ./build.sh

Usage

Launch a shell:

./cloud-shell.sh up

SSH to the virtual machine:

./cloud-shell.sh ssh

Delete the virtual machine:

./cloud-shell.sh down

rmate

The default image comes with rmate installed allowing editing of files on the remote machine. On your local machine you need to have an extension/plugin for your editor that supports Textmate's 'rmate' feature. Here are a couple of options:

• Visual Studio Code: Remote VSCode
• Sublime Text: RemoteSubl

Usage with Remote VSCode

1. Install the Remote VSCode extension.
2. Open the command palette (CTRL+P for Windows and CMD+P for Mac) then execute the >Remote: Start Server command.
3. SSH to the remote machine with ./cloud-shell.sh ssh
4. Open remote files in Visual Studio Code with the command rmate my-file.txt

SSH Agent Forwarding

This will allow use of your local SSH keys by the remote machine. For example, if you have an SSH key that you have authorised access to your GitHub account it will be usable on the remote machine.

Add the following configuration to ~/.ssh/config if you would like your local ssh key to be forwarded to the remote host. The <ip address> is the IP of the virtual machine displayed after executing ./cloud-shell.sh up.

Host <ip address>
 ForwardAgent yes

Once connected via ssh test the connection to GitHub:

ssh -T git@github.com

Known Issues

The following error message when building is due to the Too many SSH keys issue.

googlecompute: fatal: [default]: UNREACHABLE! => {"changed": false, "msg": "Failed to connect to the host via ssh: Warning: Permanently added '[127.0.0.1]:54452' (RSA) to the list of known hosts.\r\nReceived disconnect from 127.0.0.1 port 54452:2: too many authentication failures\r\nAuthentication failed.\r\n", "unreachable": true}

It can be fixed by clearing all keys from your ssh-agent.

$ ssh-add -D

License

MIT License - see the LICENSE file for details