Using GitHub Codespaces

If you don’t yet have access to a laptop on which you can install VirtualBox and Vagrant, then in the meantime, you can also use a cloud-based development VM provided by GitHub Codespaces.

(Note that if you use GitHub Codespaces, you will not be able to alter the kernel parameters of the running kernel. Altering the kernel parameters is required if you want to complete the “extension tasks” for the week 4 lab, on buffer overflows, and for the week 8 lab, on race conditions.)

You should complete the following steps:

  1. You’ll need to have a GitHub account for this, so if you don’t have one already, visit https://github.com/ and create one.

  2. Log into your GitHub account. Once that’s done, visit the following URL into your browser:

      https://github.com/cits3007/ubuntu-codespaces

    Click the green “Code” button to get a drop-down menu with tabs; select the “codespaces” tab, then “Create codespace on master”.

  3. GitHub Codespaces will start a cloud-based virtual machine in which the standard CITS3007 environment is available, and the latest version of Visual Studio Code (VS Code) editor is running:

    Initially, VS Code will start with the folder /workspaces/ubuntu-codespaces open, which contains code downloaded from https://github.com/cits3007/ubuntu-codespaces. However, you can easily create and open new folders if desired.

  4. You will often want to run commands in the terminal. Create new terminal sessions by clicking the “+” symbol, towards the lower right of the VS Code IDE in your browser.

    (Just next to it is a drop-down menu, marked with a “v” symbol – this allows shells other than the default, Bash, to be used, but we will generally want to stick with the default.)

Note that when using GitHub Codespaces, it’s up to you to ensure a copy of your code is saved in some permanent location – when the virtual machine shuts down, any files you created or altered will be lost, if they haven’t been saved elsewhere.