Azure VM

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:

sudo cp -r ~/.azure /home/coder/.azure
sudo chown -R coder:coder /home/coder/.azure/

Navigate to the ./azure-linux folder where you created your template and run the following command to put the template on your Coder instance.

coder templates push

Congrats! You can now navigate to your Coder dashboard and use this Linux on Azure template to create a new workspace!