Developer VPS - Offshore Development and Production Infrastructure

**Personal project hosting**: Side projects, open source tools, personal APIs. VPS at $6-12/month vs Lambda functions that become expensive at scale or Heroku that restricts free tiers. **Development environment**: Remote development environment accessible from any machine. VS Code Remote-SSH connects directly to your VPS, editing files as if local. Install your full development stack (Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, Docker) and access from any computer. **Staging and testing**: Mirror your production environment for testing. Test database migrations, new dependencies, and configuration changes without risking production. Anubiz Host snapshots let you capture a known-good state and restore if something breaks. **Package caching**: Local npm/pip/apt cache server. CI/CD pipelines pull packages from your cache VPS instead of public registries - faster and reliable during outages: ```bash # Verdaccio for npm cache proxy: docker run -d --name verdaccio -p 4873:4873 verdaccio/verdaccio # Configure npm client: npm config set registry http://YOUR_VPS_IP:4873 ``` **Personal DNS**: Pi-hole for ad blocking and custom DNS records across all your projects: ```bash curl -sSL https://install.pi-hole.net | bash ```

VS Code Remote-SSH transforms your VPS into a cloud development environment: 1. Install Remote-SSH extension in VS Code 2. Configure SSH connection in ~/.ssh/config: ``` Host mydev HostName YOUR_VPS_IP User developer IdentityFile ~/.ssh/dev_key Port 22 ``` 3. VS Code Remote-SSH: Connect to Host -> mydev VS Code runs locally but all file operations, terminal commands, and debugging happen on the VPS. Your development environment is always the same regardless of which computer you use. The VPS has consistent CPU and RAM rather than varying laptop performance. For teams: each developer gets their own user account on a team VPS. Shared resources (databases, caches, Docker daemon) run as shared services. Cost: one VPS split among 3-5 developers.

Docker on VPS provides isolated environments for each project: ```bash apt update && apt install docker.io docker-compose -y usermod -aG docker $USER ``` Per-project docker-compose.yml example (web app): ```yaml version: '3' services: app: build: . ports: - "3000:3000" volumes: - .:/app environment: - NODE_ENV=development - DATABASE_URL=postgresql://dbuser:pass@db:5432/mydb depends_on: - db db: image: postgres:15 volumes: - pg_data:/var/lib/postgresql/data environment: POSTGRES_USER: dbuser POSTGRES_PASSWORD: pass POSTGRES_DB: mydb volumes: pg_data: ``` `docker-compose up -d` starts the full stack. Each project has isolated containers. No dependency conflicts between projects.