Chromebook

I’ve heard rumors that a Google Chromebook can make a surprisingly sweet machine for a developer. As someone that works exclusively in the console, it’s easy enough to SSH into a server to do the actual work. Since my apps are either command line tools or web sites, I can easily test them remotely as well. I only need something with a terminal and browser… And reliable internet.

This workflow is very attractive to me: you get a conveniently portable device with great battery life on which to work, it’s cheap and essentially disposable should anything happen to it, and the machine where you actually develop can be specialized to the task. I already have such a machine available, but you could also get a fairly affordable linode or even spin up an EC2 instance.

Right out of the box, things work quite well. The Secure Shell browser extension can give you an xterm-compliant terminal directly in a browser tab. You could effectively be writing web pages in a web page. Crazy.

I decided to go a bit further and enable what’s called “Developer mode” this gives you a real bash shell and a real ssh command. I found the actual terminal to be a bit stabler, especially port forwarding.

Enabling Developer Mode 🔗

On older versions this is a physical toggle, but in the version I have it’s a software switch:

1. Hold Escape and Refresh, then press Power
2. At the blank screen, press Ctrl-D
3. Follow the prompts and enter into “Unverified” mode

The machine will eventually reboot and run some process before presenting you again with the initial setup screen.

You’re going to see a warning each time the machine boots about being in this mode. I was hoping to only see it the first boot after enabling it, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The warning times out after 30 seconds or you can press Ctrl-D to dismiss it immediately. Note that you need to use the real Ctrl key for this. For example, I’ve mapped the Search key to Ctrl, but it’s not recognized as such for this functionality.

Getting Shell 🔗

The quasi-terminal is accessed by pressing Alt-Ctrl-t. From here, type shell to start a bash shell. This is an environment any linux user should be used to, with only a few surprises.

Be sure to install the Crosh Window browser extension. It allows you to pull the browser-tab terminal out into its own window. Without it, many important key bindings will be swallowed by the browser.

The shell opens in / but you do have a proper ~/ at /home/chronos/user. Let’s cd there and setup a few niceties.

First, setup an ~/.ssh/config:

Host example.com # your dev box in the cloud
  User username  # so you don't need user@example.com
  SendEnv TERM   # we'll get to this in a second

The actual TERM is reported as linux and that leads to a pretty bad experience on the remote machine. We’ll set a custom one and send it via SendEnv. We don’t want to just export it, or the actual chrome shell acts funny, we’ll just set it on the commandline when invoking ssh.

That leads me to ~/.bashrc where we define a connect function for getting into our dev box:

# add to the bottom of the file:
connect() {
  TERM=xterm-256color ssh -L 3000:localhost:3000 example.com
}

We set that custom TERM variable and use the -L option to forward port 3000. This means that when I start up the web application I’m developing on “in the cloud”, I can access it from the chromebook’s browser at http://localhost:3000/.

SSH Keys 🔗

I don’t allow just password access to my machine(s), and prefer to use RSA keys pairs. Setting this up for the Chromebook was also super easy:

1. Generate a key pair, etc
2. Upload the private key to Google Drive
3. Move it from Drive to Downloads on the Chromebook
4. Move it from ~/Downloads to ~/.ssh/id_rsa in the shell

I typically name my keys meaningfully since I use quite a few of them for various hosts. If you do the same, just add an IdentityFile clause to your ssh config.

Conclusion 🔗

I’m very happy with this setup. The Chromebook is literally filling the exact same role previously held by a Macbook Air, but for a fraction of the price and with better battery life. This terminal is certainly better than Terminal.app and might even be better than iTerm2.

In short, do eeeeet.