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Installing Softwares

When you launch a VM in the cloud, it comes with a base image that includes a minimal set of software. However, you will often need to install additional software to run your applications or perform various tasks on the VM. In this document, we will cover how to install software on a VM running Ubuntu 22.04 and how to expose a simple web app to the internet.

Installing Software

To install software on a VM running Ubuntu 22.04, you can use the apt package manager. Here are the steps to install software on your VM:

  1. Connect to your VM using SSH. You can use the ssh command with the midgard hostname in your ~/.ssh/config file. See the previous Launching a VM document for more details.
  2. Update the package list: sudo apt update
  3. Install the software you need. For example, to install Node.js and npm, run: sudo apt install nodejs npm

You can repeat step 3 for any other software you need to install on your VM.

Example: Exposing a Simple Web App

To expose a simple web app to the internet, you can use the built-in http-server package for Node.js. Here are the steps to expose a simple web app:

  1. Install http-server: sudo npm install -g http-server
  2. Create a simple web page. You can use the following example as a starting point:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Hello, world!</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Hello, world!</h1>
    <p>This is a simple web page.</p>
  </body>
</html>
  1. Save this code as index.html in a directory of your choice.
  2. Start the http-server with the directory containing index.html as the root: http-server /path/to/directory
  3. The web app will be accessible on port 8080 of your VM.

Note that this is a simple web app for demonstration purposes only. For a real-world application, you will need to configure your web app properly for security and performance.

If you want to access the web app from your local machine, you can use SSH port forwarding to forward traffic from a local port to the VM's port 8080. For example, to forward traffic from port 8080 on your local machine to port 8080 on the VM, run the following command on your local machine:

ssh -L 8080:localhost:8080 midgard

Then you can access the web app from your local machine at http://localhost:8080. Note that in this example, the web app is only accessible from your local machine on port 8080. To make it accessible from the internet, see the Port Forwarding section.