System requirements

Use the requirements suggested in Mac User Guide.

• If you use the Windows server, refer to requirements suggested in the OpenSSH for Windows documentation.

• If you have Windows Desktop, refer to the requirements suggested in the SSH in Windows Terminal documentation.

In addition to the requirements outlined for the OpenSSH server in the Ubuntu documentation, ensure that the following minimum requirements for remote development are met, along with a few limitations:

• 4 vCPUs, either x86_64 or arm64 architecture. Also, higher clock frequency is preferred to higher core count.

• 8 GB RAM.

• Around 10 GB of free space is required on a local disk or on a network block storage, such as EBS.

  A network file system such as NFS or SMB is not acceptable.

• A supported version of a common Linux distribution.

  Specifically, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Ubuntu 22.10, CentOS, Debian, and RHEL are supported.

  • Ensure the user, with which you are connecting, has one of these shells set: bash, dash, fish, csh, tcsh, ksh, zsh.

  • The following utilities must be available: tar, wget (or curl), dd, chmod, test, mkdir, echo, mv, uname, command, and gzip.

  • The $HOME environment variable needs to be set correctly. The $HOME/.cache folder needs to be writable by the user with which you’re connecting.

  • We support the Alpine version 3.18. Ensure you have the following packages installed on the host beforehand: libxext, libxrender, libxtst, libxi, freetype, procps, gcompat.

    Check the following command example:

    apk add libxext libxrender libxtst libxi freetype procps gcompat

• OpenSSH server, version 7.9p1 or later is recommended. Other SSH servers fully implementing RFC 4254 may work too, yet are not supported. SSH port forwarding must be enabled in the server configuration.

• The server needs to have at least 50 Mbps downstream capacity from the internet.

• The connection between client and server should have at least 20 Mbps bandwidth, and no more than 200ms latency.

• Single tenancy within a server or container.

Note the following limitations in remote development:

• Single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi. To run your code on a Raspberry Pi, check out remote interpreters or remote debugging, and similar features.

• Shared web hosting services. In such hosting environment, there might be numerous websites that coexist on a single server owned and operated by the hosting provider. All the websites hosted on this server are required to share its resources, such as bandwidth, memory, and computing power. These resources are distributed evenly among all the accounts on the server, which become quite limited.

  The remote development support is not possible in such cases due to the following reasons:

  • In addition to the SSH port, there must be a free port on the server for the IDE backend to reside. Shared web hosting typically does not permit the occupation of additional ports.

  • There might be restrictions on running third-party software.

  • Shared web hosting imposes limitations on user CPU usage.

We also recommend the following:

• For larger projects, add more CPUs and RAM. The load average indication in the IDE will tell you if an upgrade would be advisable.

• Enabling Swap is recommended. Even on cloud instances.

• Local SSD storage.