Coder powers secure, scalable development across key industries — automotive, finance, government, and technology — enabling faster builds, tighter compliance, and seamless AI adoption in enterprise-grade cloud environments.
This guide shows you how to set up the Coder server on Azure which will
provision Azure-hosted Linux workspaces.
Requirements
This guide assumes you have full administrator privileges on Azure.
Create An Azure VM
From the Azure Portal, navigate to the Virtual Machines Dashboard. Click Create,
and select creating a new Azure Virtual machine .
This will bring you to the Create a virtual machine page. Select the
subscription group of your choice, or create one if necessary.
Next, name the VM something relevant to this project using the naming convention
of your choice. Change the region to something more appropriate for your current
location. For this tutorial, we will use the base selection of the Ubuntu Gen2
Image and keep the rest of the base settings for this image the same.
Up next, under Inbound port rules modify the Select inbound ports to also
take in HTTPS and HTTP.
The set up for the image is complete at this stage. Click Review and Create -
review the information and click Create. A popup will appear asking you to
download the key pair for the server. Click
Download private key and create resource and place it into a folder of your
choice on your local system.
Click Return to create a virtual machine. Your VM will start up!
Click Go to resource in the virtual machine and copy the public IP address.
You will need it to SSH into the virtual machine via your local machine.
Follow
these instructions
to SSH into the virtual machine. Once on the VM, you can run and install Coder
using your method of choice. For the fastest install, we recommend running Coder
as a system service.
Install Coder
For this instance, we will run Coder as a system service, however you can run
Coder a multitude of different ways. You can learn more about those
here.
In the Azure VM instance, run the following command to install Coder
curl -fsSL https://coder.com/install.sh | sh
Run Coder
Run the following command to start Coder as a system level service:
sudo systemctl enable --now coder
The following command will get you information about the Coder launch service
journalctl -u coder.service -b
This will return a series of logs related to running Coder as a system service.
Embedded in the logs is the Coder Access URL.
Copy the URL and run the following command to create the first user, either on
your local machine or in the instance terminal.
coder login <url***.try.coder.app>
Fill out the prompts. Be sure to save use email and password as these are your
admin username and password.
You can now access Coder on your local machine with the relevant
***.try.coder.app URL and logging in with the username and password.
Creating and Uploading Your First Template
First, run coder template init to create your first template. You’ll be given
a list of possible templates to use. This tutorial will show you how to set up
your Coder instance to create a Linux based machine on Azure.
Press enter to select Develop in Linux on Azure template. This will return
the following:
To get started using the Azure template, install the Azure CLI by following the
instructions
here.
Run az login and follow the instructions to configure the Azure command line.
Coder is running as a system service, which creates the system user coder for
handling processes. The Coder user will require access to the Azure credentials
to initialize the template.
Run the following commands to copy the Azure credentials and give the coder
user access to them:
