Remote Development Intro Chapter 3: Server
Last chapter we walked through some coding 101s. In this chapter we are getting a taste of the flexibility of remote development. If you have ever interacted with sandbox coding platforms, you may have noticed some intentional guardrails. A common one is that many sandbox platforms cannot run servers that you can access via browser, for example when you are coding a website. Remote development doesn't have this limitation.
Goal
Start a server in Python that can be accessed via your browser.
Chapter 3: Server
1: Open your codespace
On the forked repository from Chapter 1, open or re-open your codespace.
2: Run pip install -r requirements.txt in your terminal.
This is a command which installs the requirements listed in requirements.txt. In this chapter we are using the flask library, which is not included in the base Python installation, so we need to install it using pip, a package manager.
3: Open the server.py file under src/chapter3.
Fill in the TODO comments at the top of the file. Look back to Chapter 2 for a refresher on variables, strings, and numbers.
4: Your server
In programming, a server is a program that listens for requests from clients (like web browsers). This is a bread-and-butter concept in all sorts of coding projects. We are going to start up a server on your codebase, and access it via your web browser.
After running python src/chapter3/server.py in your terminal, you should see this:
Ctrl/Command click on the second link. It will direct you to open an external window, and you should see this:
Since this is an introduction series, we are not going to go into the details of how all of this works. But what we have just done is demonstrates a lot about remote development. Here is a simplified version of what happened in this chapter, and where remote development fits in:
- When you start a server, the server has an address.
- When coding on your own machine, generally you would start your server on that same machine.
- When you run the
python src/chapter3/server.pycommand, you are starting a server on your local machine, and it would produce some address that you can access via your (you guessed it!) local machine. - But instead of running the server on your local machine, you are running it on your codespace machine.
- So when you run the command, it produces an address that lives on the codespace machine, which is somewhere in the nebula that is the GitHub data centers.
- So in order to access that address, we can use the url that codespaces gives us.
5. Commit and push your change, using the same steps from Chapter 2
Commit and push your changes to save progress.
Done ✅
You started a live server on your codespace machine, and accessed it via a web browser. We also reviewed strings, numbers, and git operations. This concludes the Remote Development Intro. We hope this gives you a glimpse into the convenience of remote development without sacrificing functionality. The vast majority of personal coding projects can be completed entirely on remote development.
Questions?
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