Quick Start

For testing purposes, you can download one of the published generic cloud image from Debian, for example,

https://cloud.debian.org/images/cloud/bookworm/latest/debian-12-genericcloud-amd64.raw

The creation of Windows images is a bit more involved but we provide a tool and a set of comprehensive instructions to make it easier. Please see the Working with Windows VM guide.

In the web console, navigate to your project. Click on Images on the left side bar.

Now click on Upload image on the right side of the page.

This will open the Upload image box. Give your image a name and fill in the rest of the required information. For this example, we’ll use the Debian image mentioned above. Once you have downloaded the image to your workstation, click on Upload image in the lower right of the box.

When the image has uploaded successfully click Done in the lower right of the box.

You should now see the newly uploaded image listed on the Images page. The image will be available for creating the boot disk of a new instance.

More information about how to manage images can be found in the Creating and Sharing Images guide.

This is a brief guide on how to create an SSH key with Windows 11, Linux, and Mac OS. The particular commands needed might be different than what is below, depending on your particular version of each OS and your choice of SSH key options.

To generate an SSH key pair on Mac OS, first open a Terminal window to get the command line interface.

On your workstation, run the command:

Next you will be prompted to provide the location where you want to create the public and private key pair. Leave this empty to create the key in the default location, which is $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa.

You may be prompted to choose a passphrase. There is none needed if you do not want to use one.

In Windows 11 you can generate SSH keys directly from the Command Prompt without needing any third party solutions. (These instructions should also be applicable to Windows 10)

Once you complete the steps above, the private and public keypair will be generated and stored in the .ssh folder inside your profile folder. The private key will not include a file extension, while the public key will have a .pub extension.

The SSH keys you added on the Create Instance page can be found in your account settings. To navigate there, click on your user name in the upper right of the screen and choose Settings.

This will open your Profile page. Click on SSH Keys on the left side bar.

To add another public key, click on the Add SSH Key button on the right of the page.

This will open the Add SSH Key form. Enter a name for your public key, then click Add SSH Key in the bottom right of the box.

To remove an existing key, simply click on the three dots on the right-most column of the SSH key table and click Delete.

Assuming that you have executed sudo apt update earlier, you can now type and execute this command

in the SSH session, which will install the ncal package.

Once you’ve done that, if you enter cal or cal 2024 command, you should see a calendar presented in the terminal.

We’ll start by creating a basic HTTP server with a simple "Hello World" homepage. You’ll do so by executing the following commands in a Linux VM:

At this point, your server should be up and running. You can verify that with curl:

If you try the same command from your workstation against the external IP of your VM, i.e.,

you’ll notice that the command hangs and eventually times out. This is because the default firewall settings in the VM’s VPC allow inbound external connections only on certain ports.

To customize the firewall rules, navigate back to the instance details page for your VM, then click on the VPC name (it should be default if you have kept the advanced settings unchanged during instance creation).

There, you’ll see the Firewall Rules tab and a list of existing rules. Let’s take a look at the allow-ssh rule by clicking on the rule name.

The rule is configured to allow inbound TCP connections on port 22 from any host. To allow your HTTP server to be accessible from anywhere, you can add a new rule that mimics the allow-ssh rule, except that it’ll have port 80 as the filter criteria.

First, click on New Rule and enter the following information:

You can leave other fields with the default values and click Add Rule at the bottom of the form.

Now you can retry the curl command from your workstation and it should return "Hello World".

If you are running a different application that uses other port numbers, you can just replace 80 with the relevant port number or range in the rule. If you want to open multiple discrete ports, you can add them one at a time with Add Port Filter in a single rule. More information about firewall rules is available in the Guest Neworking guide.