This post is for those who find it much easier to program in a cloud based IDE, straight from their browser. The following instructions are for Cloud 9 IDE installation on Centos, RHEL or Amazon Linux.

First of all login to your Linux machine using SSH and cd to your home folder, or wherever you want to install C9.

In my case: cd /home/ec2-user Then run the following command, which will install all dependencies required for Cloud 9 to run on a Linux machine:

yum -y install nodejs git gcc glibc-static ncurses-devel

Now we will clone the C9 github project and build the installation from it, run the following command (note c9sdk at the end, that's the folder in your home directory where the project will be cloned to):

git clone git://github.com/c9/core.git c9sdk

Now we should be able to switch to a newly cloned C9sdk folder:

cd c9sdk

Now we can start the installation process:

scripts/install-sdk.sh

The process will go for about 2-3 minutes and once installed, you'd see the following message:

This is saying that we should be ready t0 start the Cloud 9 IDE by running the startup command: node server.js -p 8080 -a : Note: You can change the port to your liking, especially if you don't want to run it on a default port 8080 which is often used by application servers such as Tomcat or JBoss.

The following options can be used for server.sj:

--settings       Settings file to use
--help           Show command line options.
-t               Start in test mode
-k               Kill tmux server in test mode
-b               Start the bridge server - to receive commands from the cli  [default: false]
-w               Workspace directory
--port           Port
--debug          Turn debugging on
--listen         IP address of the server
--readonly       Run in read only mode
--packed         Whether to use the packed version.
--auth           Basic Auth username:password
--collab         Whether to enable collab.
--no-cache       Don't use the cached version of CSS

Anyhow, I've decided to run it on a little less used port 9191, like this:

node server.js -p 9191 -a username:password

Note the two additional parameters at the end (access credentials), which you should consider supplying, especially if you're planning to log into Cloud9 IDE from a remote machine.

This is also a command that you should perhaps schedule to autostart with your Linux system on boot, so you don't have to run it every single time you want to code using your browser.

Running above command confirms that my server is up and running now:

Now, if this is a remote server, which you'll be accessing from your own workstation, make sure to add a firewall exception for the port you've decided to use.

Once done, visit http://server-address:9191 , it'll ask you for a login name and password for the user under which we've started Cloud9 IDE, just type it in:

Then you'll be able to see your cloud IDE:

If you want to change in which workspace you want your IDE to start, for example if you want to live edit your files in /var/www folder where you're hosting your website, you can start the server with -w option like this: node server.js -p 9191 -a username:password -w /var/www Another option is to change the following workspaceDir variable (but I didn't test if this works)

Note:

If you ever need to upgrade Cloud 9 SDK to the latest version, simply go back to your home folder, cd to c9sdk folder and run:

git pull origin master
scripts/install-sdk.sh