Connecting via SSH

While Clacky is designed as a complete cloud development environment, it still accommodates your local development habits, allowing you to use SSH to connect your local IDE (such as VSCode or Cursor) to Clacky’s development container, modify, and synchronize code.

Understanding SSH

SSH, or Secure Shell, is a protocol designed to provide secure remote access to a command line interface. By using SSH, you can efficiently transfer files and utilize your favorite local Integrated Development Environment (IDE) to edit code within Clacky’s development environment, thereby boosting collaboration and productivity.

Here’s a brief guide to get started:

• Create an SSH keypair on your local system
• Add the SSH key to the “SSH” section within any Thread
• Use an SSH client or an editor that supports SSH connections to connect

Find or Create a keypair

To configure SSH for your account, you’ll need your SSH public key.

Figuring out if you already have a keypair

You can check if you already have a public key by running the following command in a Terminal on your local computer:

ls -l ~/.ssh

If you get an error, that’s OK, proceed to Generating a new keypair.

Generating a new keypair

On your machine, open a Terminal (or Command Prompt) window and paste the following command:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "your_email@example.com"

This command checks if a specific SSH public key file already exists. If not, it creates a new SSH key with some sensible parameters.

Get the contents of your Public Key

Once you have either confirmed you have a keypair or created one, display the contents of the public key (one of the two similarly named files, suffixed with .pub), as we’ll need that for later.

cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub

Save the contents of id_rsa.pub to use later in this article and proceed to add the SSH key to your account.

Add the SSH key to your account

Click on your avatar in the top right corner of the workspace page to open the ‘Manage Account’ window. Navigate to the SSH Keys tab, select ‘Add SSH Key +’, and enter the public key you saved in the pop-up window.

Use Clacky with VS Code

To connect VS Code to Clacky, navigate to your desired development thread and open the CDE Tools SSH window. From there, you can either click the VS Code remote URL or copy it to your browser. After authorizing VS Code access, you’ll be connected remotely to the Clacky development environment.

Use Clacky with Cursor

Similar to VS Code, you can connect Cursor to Clacky by clicking the Cursor remote URL or copying it to your browser from the CDE Tools SSH window. Once authorized, Cursor will establish a remote connection to the Clacky development environment.

Use Clacky with CLI

For CLI or other IDE connections, navigate to your development thread and open the CDE Tools SSH window. You’ll find a shell command that you can copy to establish a remote connection through your preferred terminal or development environment.