Thoughts on a lightweight dev setup for edge drivers

Developer Programs
#1

All

I don’t really have a place i can install all of the dev tools for edge development - I couldn’t get it working on chromebook or raspberry pi and I cannot use my work laptop for this kind of thing so up until now I have been using a really old family windows PC that I have been powering on each time I need to debug, dev or test something. This was frustrating as it meant i could only do it at that one desk.

I decided to look into what I could do that is more modern approach - and it is working pretty sweet, so I thought i would share here. I can now dev and test edge drivers in 2 browser windows from any machine.

This isn’t intended to be a guide you can follow, more an inspiration for anybody facing similar problems.

IDE
As my code is in github I decided to use github.dev as an ide, this allows me to edit the code using a web based version of ms code, and commit the code to a feature branch directly on that webpage

Publishing

  • I setup a free virtual machine on oracle cloud
  • installed git so i can pull the code to that machine
  • Use a second browser tab and oracle cloud console to ssh into the virtual machine
  • installed the smartthings cli on the virtual machine - auth it using pat token
  • this allows me to publish drivers to my channels and install them to my hub

Testing

  • I used the same oracle VM with the CLI installed for testing on my hub using logcat
  • to do this I added the VM to my tailscale (free) network so that the VM could access my home network and 192 addresses (i already had tailscale setup - it’s great)
  • this means i can run logcat in the cloud connected to me st hub :slight_smile:

Interested to hear if anybody else has took a lightweight approach, and what you have done.

Thanks

Louis

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#2

This is nice. My primary laptop at home is a Chromebook and setting it up to run Linux means a complete rebuild of Chrome to allow that environment. Doable, but not something I want to do since I’ve not done that before. I was also going down the VM route but didn’t think of Oracle. I’m glad to hear this is working, and it’s inspired me to do the same. Thanks for sharing!

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#3

My Chromebook is arm and quite underpowered, I did try this route using Linux but gave up in the end

Louis

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#4

I’m definitely going to have to look into doing this myself.

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#5

The key is connectivity, so make sure you have that sorted before you embark on the journey.

I used tailscale, but any VPN or wireguard solution should work as long as it provides a way for you to tunnel the connection back onto your home network for use of the logcat commands within the cli.

The ide provider and cloud provider could easily be switched too any provider. I’m tight so went for the free ones that I already had access to.

The only bit I haven’t figured out yet is getting autocomplete working on GitHub.dev

Louis

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