Did you know you can run Visual Studio Code in a browser? It’s so cool, it even works with extensions and all that. I’ll show you an example using github.com/cdr/code-server

Go to console.cloud.google.com and open Cloud Shell

Enable Boost Mode to make it faster

Install code-server

export VERSION=`curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/cdr/code-server/releases/latest | grep -oP '"tag_name": "\K(.*)(?=")'` wget https://github.com/cdr/code-server/releases/download/$VERSION/code-server-$VERSION-linux-x86_64.tar.gz tar -xvzf code-server-$VERSION-linux-x86_64.tar.gz cd code-server-$VERSION-linux-x86_64

Start the server

./code-server --no-auth --port 8080

Note that you don’t need authentication since the Google Cloud Shell proxy already handles that for you.

Click on Web Preview -> Preview on port 8080

If you get a 404, remove ?authuser=0 from the url. So for example, just

https://8080-dot-YOURID-dot-devshell.appspot.com/

instead of

https://8080-dot-YOURID-dot-devshell.appspot.com/?authuser=0

That’s it, now you have an IDE running in your browser!