Running and Previewing Your App

Your CloudCLI Cloud environment comes bare bones by default, which means you install only what you need. The devuser account has full sudo access so you can set up any stack.

Installing Software

Use apt to install whatever your project needs:

# Node.js
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y nodejs npm

# Python
sudo apt update && sudo apt install -y python3 python3-pip

You can install any package available in the Ubuntu repositories, so whatever stack your project requires (Ruby, Go, Java, etc.) is just an apt install away. Your AI coding agent can also handle this for you as part of setting up a project.

Starting a Dev Server

Once your code is ready (whether you wrote it or an agent generated it), start the dev server for your stack:

# Node.js / Express / Next.js
npm run dev

# Python / Flask
python3 -m flask run --host=0.0.0.0 --port=8000

# Python / Django
python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Important: Bind to 0.0.0.0 rather than localhost or 127.0.0.1 so the server is accessible for port forwarding.

Previewing in Your Browser

How you access the running app depends on how you're connected:

Via VS Code Remote-SSH (recommended)

If you're connected through VS Code with the Remote-SSH extension, port forwarding happens automatically. When your dev server starts, VS Code detects the open port and shows a notification offering to forward it. Click Open in Browser and your app loads on localhost:8000 (or whichever port you used) as if it were running locally.

You can also open the Ports panel in VS Code (Ctrl+Shift+P then search for "Ports") to see and manage all forwarded ports.

Via SSH from a terminal

If you connected with a plain SSH session, use SSH port forwarding:

ssh -L 8000:localhost:8000 devuser@your-session-host

Then open http://localhost:8000 in your browser.

Tips

• Let the agent set things up. If you're using Claude Code or another AI coding agent, you can ask it to install dependencies, configure the database, and start the server for you.
• Bind to 0.0.0.0. If your app isn't showing up after port forwarding, check that the dev server is bound to 0.0.0.0, not 127.0.0.1.