The Immortal IDE: Building a Free, Always-On GitHub Codespace Alternative

Tutorials & Methods
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Hello Everyone,

Let’s stop playing games with temporary trials and limited-hour free tiers. GitHub Codespaces is powerful, but the free plan is a leash—it times out, it runs out, and it keeps you on a clock. We can do better.

This is a detailed guide to building your own Immortal IDE: a personal, powerful, always-on, cloud-based VS Code environment that you can access from any browser, anywhere in the world. It has no idle timeouts and costs $0.00, forever. This isn’t a glitch; it’s an architectural exploit of free-tier cloud infrastructure.

The Architecture: The “Unbeatable” Free Tier Trinity

This setup works by combining three powerful, free-forever services in a way that creates a professional-grade development environment.

  1. The Compute Engine (Oracle Cloud Free Tier): This is the heart of the exploit. Unlike AWS or Azure whose free tiers are temporary or extremely limited, Oracle offers a genuinely useful “Always Free” tier that includes powerful Ampere A1 ARM-based compute instances (up to 4 cores and 24GB of RAM!). This is more than enough power for serious development, compiling code, and running servers. This is our server.
  2. The IDE (code-server): This is the open-source project that powers VS Code in the browser (and is the foundation of Codespaces). We will install this directly onto our free Oracle VM.
  3. The Secure Gateway (Cloudflare Tunnel): To access our IDE securely from anywhere without exposing our server to the public internet (no open ports, no IP addresses), we’ll use a free Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel. This gives us a secure HTTPS URL for our IDE.

Step 1: Provision Your Free Supercomputer (Oracle Cloud)

This is the most crucial step. Oracle’s sign-up can be strict, but their Always Free offering is unmatched.

  1. Go to the Oracle Cloud Free Tier website (oracle.com/cloud/free/).
  2. Sign up for an account. You will need a credit card for identity verification, but you will not be charged as long as you only use resources marked “Always Free”.
  3. Once in the dashboard, navigate to Compute > Instances.
  4. Click Create instance. This is where you configure your free server.
  • Name: Give it a name, e.g., immortal-ide.
  • Placement: Leave as is.
  • Image and shape: Click Edit.
    • Click Change image and select Ubuntu (a recent LTS version is best).
    • Click Change shape and select the Ampere category. Choose the VM.Standard.A1.Flex shape.
    • Drag the sliders to allocate resources. You can allocate up to 4 OCPUs (cores) and 24 GB of memory for free! Start with 2 cores and 8 GB of RAM.
  • Networking: Leave as default. It will create a new virtual cloud network.
  • Add SSH keys: This is how you will log in. Select “Generate a key pair for me” and click Save Private Key and Save Public Key. Keep the private key file safe.
  1. Click Create. Wait for the instance to be provisioned. Once it’s running, copy its Public IP Address.

Step 2: Install and Configure the IDE (code-server)

Now, we turn our powerful VM into a VS Code instance.

  1. Connect via SSH: Open a terminal on your computer and use the private key you downloaded to connect. `Bash# Make sure your key is not publicly viewable
    chmod 400 /path/to/your/privateKey.key

Connect to the instance

ssh -i /path/to/your/privateKey.key ubuntu@YOUR_PUBLIC_IP_ADDRESS2. **Run the Installer:** Once logged into your VM, run this single command. It will download and installcode-serverand set it up to run as a service (so it starts automatically on reboot).Bashcurl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh3. **Start and Enable the Service:**Bashsudo systemctl enable --now code-server@$USER4. **Find Your Password:**code-serveris now running, but it's protected by a password. View the config file to get it:Bashcat ~/.config/code-server/config.yamlLook for thepassword:field and copy it.code-serveris now running onlocalhost:8080` inside your VM. Now we need to expose it to the world securely.

Step 3: Create the Secure Gateway (Cloudflare Tunnel)

This will give you a secure https:// URL for your IDE.

  1. Sign up for a free Cloudflare account and add a domain you own. (If you don’t own one, you can register a cheap .xyz domain for $1).
  2. In your Cloudflare dashboard, go to the Zero Trust section from the left sidebar.
  3. Navigate to Access > Tunnels. Click Create a tunnel.
  4. Give the tunnel a name (e.g., vscode-tunnel) and save it.
  5. You’ll be shown commands to install the cloudflared connector. In the Debian tab, copy the commands and run them in your SSH session on the Oracle VM. This will install the connector and link it to your Cloudflare account.
  6. Once connected, you’ll be prompted to set up a Public Hostname.
  • Subdomain: Enter something like ide.
  • Domain: Select your domain.
  • Service > Type: Select HTTP.
  • Service > URL: Enter localhost:8080.
  1. Save the tunnel.

The Final Result: Your Immortal IDE

You’re done. Navigate to the subdomain you just created (e.g., https://ide.yourdomain.com). You will be greeted by the VS Code login screen. Enter the password you retrieved from the config.yaml file.

You are now looking at a full VS Code interface running on a powerful, free, always-on cloud server that only you can access. You can install extensions, open a terminal, pull git repos, and run development servers—all from any browser in the world. You have successfully bypassed the commercial limitations and built a superior personal tool by cleverly architecting free-tier services.

Enjoy your permanent place in the cloud.

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