Run Your Coding Agents in the Cloud with Herdr transcript

In this video, I'm going to show you how you can run all of your favorite coding agents like Claude, Codex, and Grok in the cloud so they continue running even when you close your laptop. So in this video, you will learn how to set up a virtual private server using Hostinger. We will install Herdr on that server and connect it to all our favorite coding agents like Claude and Codex. I'll show you how you can easily access your server on a daily basis and also protect it with a firewall.

We'll go through all the required configurations and then I will show you how you can use this in your daily workflow and now this setup is perfect for you if you are working with agents all day and you want to make sure they continue running regardless of which device you are on all right so let's get to work and set all of this up so let's start with how this is all going to fit together and what we are going to build to this video right so we are going to set up a vps a virtual private surfer that we're going to rent so this is essentially the cloud part of it and on there we're going to install Herdr and then we're going to set up Claude Code and Codex.

Now this is the setup that I've also showed in my previous video but then just running it on your own device. Now if you haven't checked that video out already I highly recommend to start there first so you understand what Herdr is and what Herdr does. But what it essentially is it is a terminal multiplexer specifically designed for your agents. So I've been using this as my daily driver for all coding projects over the past two weeks and I'm loving it so far I have all my different projects over here I can start cloud sessions I can then come in over here start a codex session and then I can even come in here create a Grok session you know and all of the other harnesses that you might want to use it's all there.

And the beauty of Herdr is that it runs on its own server on your device so that even when you close your terminal, it keeps on running. Now, this is amazing on your own device and laptop so that, for example, when you accidentally close a terminal session, it keeps running. But there's still another issue. What if you close your laptop? What if you shut down your laptop? What if you need to travel somewhere? Then your agents will stop running.

And this setup is going to fix that by moving everything onto a VPS. And now I think this is going to be a setup that's going to become more popular in the future as we start to realize we're going to offload more and more work to agents and we want to essentially disconnect them from the physical devices that we have around them and rather have a centralized place where all the work lives. And then we with our different devices, whether that's your laptop, your desktop, or your mobile phone, we can just tap into that.

But we have a persistent cloud-based workspace. All right, so now that you understand what we're going to build and how this all fits together, the first step that we're going to work on is setting up a VPS. Now, there are a lot of companies that you could use to rent a VPS. But one of the problems is that over the past year, a lot of these companies have really increased their prices 2x, sometimes even 3x, because of the shortage of RAM that is going on.

And I've found that Hostinger right now still has one of the most competitive prices when it comes to private virtual machines, while also offering a lot of other nice features in their UI and dashboards that we can use. So for this tutorial and setup, I recommend getting a VPS with at least 8 gigabytes of RAM. You can push this, of course, as high as you want, depending on your budget, but this will get you far for running your coding agents on there.

So. Let's go through this setup process and see what we can do over here. So if we come over to Hostinger's plan in this case and we follow through on the one where we have 8 gigabytes of RAM, you can see here like pretty much like the more RAM and of course you'll get the more expensive it will be on a monthly basis. All right. And then when we get to the checkout page, there are some settings and configurations that we can do.

Mainly we can decide how long we want to lock in that plan, right? So on 12 months, we already get a really big discount. If you want to lock it in for two years, it's even bigger. And the cool thing about getting a VPS anywhere really is that you can also reuse it. So you can also use it for learning, for projects, for deployments, or in this case, for coding agents, of course. All right, so then we go to server location.

So just make a location that makes sense for you. Ideally, you just want to pick the one that's closest to you. And then here's something we can do. we can actually already select Herdr in here and confirm that. So what this will do, this will already set up the VPS with Herdr installed on it. Saves us a couple of configuration files. But the cool thing is that you can also browse through like lots of other setups that you may want to have either for this VPS or for future VPSs that you work with.

All right. And then once you log that in, Hostinger even gave me a discount code for my audience. That would be Dave VPS to lock in another 10% on that yearly plan for first time subscribers. All right, so if you just follow through with that and confirm the setup, the startup process now begins. So now we will be redirected to the dashboard, the hosting or panel. And from here, we can get into configuring our VPS. Now, this is a very important part because this is going to be part of the security aspects of it.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the guides that we have over here. Pull that to this side and then add this over here so the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to create a root password so this is a password protection for your surfer and then we're also going to add an ssh key which we're going to use to actually authenticate into the surfer all right now for your password which is going to give you root access on the virtual machine you can either click generate or use your own password manager to create one i'm just going to plug one in here that I already created make sure you save this and then the next thing is we're going to add an ssh key password is for authentication on the server itself as a user for root access and an ssh key is how we're going to connect to the server now we're going to set up an ssh key on your own device by following the instructions over here so depending on whether you are on are on mac os linux or windows you can use the following commands over here so I'm going to copy this.

And we're going to run this inside a terminal I'm going to run this so we're going to run ssh keygen in this case because I'm on Mac and we're going to point it to the next instructions and then you can give it a passphrase if you want I'm just going to hit enter and leave that open one more time and now you can see that it has created the ssh key so make sure to keep this private and secure all right and then once you created the ssh key the next step is to copy the public key so here again are the commands in order to do that so if I open up another terminal session.

Do it fresh again, what this will do is we'll copy it to your clipboard. And then what we can do over here is we can add a new SSH key and paste it in here. Again, you want to keep this information private and then you can just give it a name. You could give it your device name. For example, I'm just going to call it demo. And that's the first step to securing your VPS with a password and an SSH key. So I click next, we can just finish the setup.

We don't need a malware scanner right now and Hostinger will now set up the VPS this will take a couple of minutes so let's wait for this to finish and come back all right and we're done so that wraps up the section on creating the server now let's see how we can log into the server and access it so we're first going to do this via the web console so the first thing that we can do is if we come over here still this is all in the web browser we can go in here in the Hostinger panel so what we can do over here first is we can connect via the web console and if I click over here a new tab should open and there we go we are now in our server and we can start working on this via our terminal in the browser so if I now come back over here to.

Our playbook we can now for example check without installing anything is Herdr installed on this VPS and the answer is yes so that also means that I can now I just run Herdr and I'm now inside Herdr here. So this is already a great step, right? We created the VPS, we connected via the browser and Herdr is up and running. All right, so now that we know that we can connect to our VPS and Herdr is up and running, let's now continue with the next step and actually connect from our laptop.

So I'm going to close the web console over here and then we're going to open up a terminal over here on our own device. And then what we want to do is we want to get the following command and then replace the. Vps ip that you see over here with the ip, from our server so we can copy this here in the dashboard come back to our terminal and put it right behind the at symbol and then run this so the first time this will ask you for a confirmation and then first i'm going to say yes and then now you can see that we are also inside our server.

And i can also connect to Herdr over here but now from our own terminal session rather than through the web interface so we're already making great progress we can ssh into the server start Herdr but now let's zoom out a little bit and understand this process a little bit better to make sure we know what's going on and how we can further protect this and then what it would look like on a daily basis if we start using this so now that you know how to connect from your laptop the next thing that i recommend to do this is all optional but is save a shortcut so we can easier get into it without remembering all of the commands.

So we can do that by editing our config, our SSH config file. So here again, different commands for where you can find that you can first create it if this is the first time. You are working with a config file. That is what a touch command does here on macOS. So if I just open up a new terminal in here and we just open up this folder and in here is your config file. Now, if I take this config file and then open this with any text editor or pretty much any application that you want, we can start to make edits to this.

So if I come in here and then just create some space and add this snippet over here, and then this is where I would place the IP address from my server and I save this and close it out what I can now do next whenever I open up a new terminal session over here let me. Make sure to refresh this I can now ssh into my agent cloud or whatever you've decided that you want to use as a command and now when I go in here I'm directly into my server so this is just a little shortcut that makes it easier okay now that we have configured our server and got access we're going to set up a daily user that we're also going to.

Use for our coding agents because the root user has root access and can pretty much change all the configurations on your server as well so we want to be a little bit more careful here and this is just a recommendation of a general setup that I'm going to share with you but of course you can customize this to however you want to set it up but I'm going to create a developer user so what we can now do if we copy this command we can first create a user so let's set that up and then we create that user and then next we want to give it access to that ssh key so again here is then a command that we need to run from our own laptop so i'm going to spin up another terminal over here so make sure this is on your own device check which operating system you have and then from here we're going to run the following command now as you go through this again if you're doing this for the first time, you may want to use your coding agents to understand, okay, what are we doing?

How is all of this working? Especially before you start to share sensitive information with servers like this, you want to understand what's going on over here. So when I run this, we have now given our developer user access to this key. And now we also need to give our developer user access to Herdr because by default is just installed for the root user. So we're going to run one more one-time command over here. I'm going to paste this in, paste this, and then run the following in order to set that up.

Now, next, what we can do, if you decided to follow along with this as well, is we can change our shortcut so that our login instead of user root becomes the developer. So we store this in here and now if I exit out of my server. And clear this up we can now do an ssh and we can run our agent, cloud you can now see that we now go into our server but now with a developer user account and now this is just something to keep in mind that there are two accounts in here and whenever you want to make system level changes as a root user you can log in with the root user again in order to do that you can also check always like when you run this command who am I to see if you are on developer or if you are on root.

Okay next let's talk about security because right now our server is protected essentially by our ssh key right if we have that key we can enter the server. Now while this is already generally okay we can even take it to the next level and add a firewall on our server and that pretty much means that we can only connect to our server first of all with the key but also only from whitelisted IP addresses now this is something you can do if you have a fixed IP address and if you use something like a VPN of some sort so.

We personally inside Datalumina have been using NordLayer for this for over the past years that gives you a dedicated IP address because if you're on a residential provider usually you have a rotating IP address so you can of course come into the portal again and change that but it's better to get a fixed IP address and use a VPN for this this is generally what I would recommend to do so I'm going to quickly show you where in the portal you can do that and then you can just follow along with the documentation over here in order to set up that SSH rule.

So if I come over here to the portal and make sure that you are on your server under security, we can have a firewall. And here you can see this is the server that I've already set up. I have that Herdr SSH NordLayer and you can add new firewall rules by going into the portal. Changing the configuration name and then in the documentation you'll find exactly the settings that i recommend for you to set up and then for context here you can see what that looks like you see the port 22 which you connect over via ssh you can see the whitelisted ip address that is your ip and then it pretty much drops all other incoming traffic now the cool thing is about firewall configurations that you can also share them across multiple vpss so if you set this up once you can just come over to.

Your firewall configuration and then I can also just enable it for this server that I just created. And then one quick thing, I've been getting a lot of questions lately about the types of projects that we work on with Datalumina, our AI development company. So if you're interested in starting as a freelancer or starting your agency, but not sure where to start, I created this free resource for you. You can grab it in the description.

This is our proposal framework. So every project that we take on, we first create a proposal and this is the exact structure that we use. And I've included a bonus as well where I have an entire proposal that we shared. I anonymized it so you can see the pricing, the breakdown, the details, everything that we do. So that is going to give you a lot of insights if you also potentially want to sell data and AI solutions.

So make sure to grab it for free in the description. All right, so now that we also know how to protect our server, let's get into the agent configuration and setup so we can actually start working with this. And remember, everything we've done up until this point and a few more steps is just a one-time setup. So the first thing that we need is we are going to need a connection with GitHub, right? Because probably you want to like get your repositories, create PRs, commits.

So let's set this up right now. And for this, we're going to use root access. So we're going to do SSH, root, and then the agent cloud. And. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to make sure we have GitHub installed and configured in here. So that is a one-time command. And then let's exit out of that and now connect as the developer again. So we can just run this without our root access because now we can install Cloud Code and Codex and potentially any other harness that you want to get on there.

So here currently are the commands to run. So we could just run them both at the same time, clod and codex and make sure that we now get this onto our developer build. All right so clod code is installed codex asks for a confirmation with y so press y hit enter. Okay now next we need to authenticate our accounts on the server and we need to do that for all of our coding harnesses and subscriptions as well as for github.

That is the most minimal setup that we need. Let's start with GitHub and run these commands one by one to use the GitHub CLI for this. So first it's going to ask, do you want to log in or authenticate with GitHub credentials? We'll do a why. Then we're going to copy this code over here that we get. Then I'm going to press enter. And then here's where it can get a little bit tricky because right now it tries to open the browser, but here on the server, we don't have that browser.

So what you want to do is simply I can hit command and then click on this URL, but you can also just paste that into the browser. So you can see github.com forward slash login forward slash device. So I'm going to now open this here on my own browser. Then I'm going to hit continue. you. And then this is where I'm going to paste the code that was shared over here. So this is a common practice when you use these terminals and servers to authenticate.

You will also see that with Clot and probably with OpenAI in later steps as well, depending on the time of this recording and what they might change around that. You can then just follow the setup here in the browser that GitHub is guiding you through, accept it. And then here you can see that we are now officially logged in. Now then also probably what you want to do is you want to set your name and your email. So you can come in here and also globally set the name for your GitHub user, and you can do the same for your email address if you want to.

Okay. And now we need to do the same for cloud code. So let's run the following command, cloud auth login. So make sure to do this all on the server. And then what we get again, we get this URL, which we can click and then open in our browser on our own device. This will take us to the authorization process, click authorize, and then you will see the following code. So we copy that and then we paste it over here. Now, one thing to note is if you paste in here, you will not see the code.

So if I now hit paste, you can see it looks like nothing happened, but all you just need to do right now is hit enter. And then you can see login successful. And now that cloud code is authenticated, let's continue with codex. And here's one extra step that you may need to do. So because we're doing a device authentication, the first time I did this for my Codex or GPT account, I had to go into the security settings and turn that on to approve that.

But it will show you if you need to do that. So if I run Codex login device out, you can see that we get another code that we can now copy. And then you will see the following screen where you can actually paste that code. If you get the error in here, then first you need to go into your security settings in order to adjust that. I just paste the code in here, continue, and we are now signed into Codex. And this will take a couple of seconds.

And there you can see, login successful. All right, so now to check if all of this works, what I'm going to do is I'm going to open up a Herdr session. And just first of all here, I'm going to check, can I start Codex? And yes, I can start Codex. I'll trust this folder and I will pretty much ask, hey, are you there? So let's run this and then also open up another tab. And run a Claude session in here yes dark mode is okay use my subscription and then here inside Claude we need one more authentication step so you need to check if you can click this or we need to copy paste this so this is specific to Claude Code and it also said that you could hit you could tap C to copy that entire line so that might be a little bit easier so we'll copy the entire code select the terminal over here paste it and then hit enter and now we should also be successfully locked in over here.

We can enter trust this folder and then I can say, hey, are you there? So we have another model that is now configured. So OpenAI is here, Cloth is here, and we're ready to go. All right, so now that we've installed the agents, let's do the final setup steps in order to bring this all together. So first of all, when we are working on this server over here, in the beginning, there's no file system, there's nothing. So what I recommend to do is create a folder, call it repositories.

And this is going to be the folder that you will be working from. So I'll create the repositories and then go in here and this will right now be an empty folder. Now, if we use this as our starting point, what we can do from here, this is where we can start to clone projects. So if I now come over to, let's say, let's pick my personal GitHub and then let's take my AI cookbook and I'm just gonna grab the URL over here and then I'm just going to run a.

Git clone and I paste that URL in here. So you can now see that right now in my repositories, I got my AI cookbook. Now, the next thing that I recommend is connecting Herdr with your coding harnesses that you want to use. So this was also part of my original setup in Herdr. So we can just run the following command, Herdr integrations install claude. We'll run that. We'll do the same for Codex and then we can check the status on all of that.

And you can do this for all harnesses that are supported by Herdr. You can also check the official documentation. Now you can also add the Herdr skill. So I recommend this if you really want to have a multi-agent system where Codex can also spawn Claude sub-agents and vice versa. So in order to do that, you can run the following command in order to set all of that up. So let's take this, let's paste it in here and then just run it in a single shot in order to set all of that up.

And if we now want to create a new folder in here, let's do a make there and let's call this a demo and let's go into that. And now from here, let's start Herdr. So now I am inside Herdr and I can now add a new space in here. And then from here, we're going into our repositories and then into our demo project, which is currently empty. And this is the setup that we have right now. And then here I can... Get started with a codex session, for example.

We'll trust the hooks that have been set up. And now I'm inside a brand new project and I can get to work. All right. So now we have almost covered everything and we can get into the customization and the setup. And the beauty of Herdr is that everything comes with a configuration file. So if you've already used Herdr on like your personal device, you can just copy those settings straight to your cloud environment as well and reuse that.

Now there's one more thing that I want to show you which I like as well is you can also use Visual Studio Code or cursor in order to connect to your server via SSH. So if I open up a new cursor window over here you can see the default that already says connect via SSH and then I can select my shortcut. So I'm going to select the agent cloud and now you can see we're jumping straight into that server here inside cursor and then what we can do is we can use the controls over here to maximize the terminal panel and then here start our Herdr setup and now you can see we are doing this but then inside visual studio code so now you can see we're in the same Herdr session on the server and here we just have a different way of working with this what i like about this is that we can also for example.

Open up a folder in here and we can actually browse through our server with a visual interface. So if I now come over here and come to the developer where we were, right, we created our repositories. So you can see now I can, for example, get into my AI cookbook and I can hit okay. You can now see that I can open up this entire project here inside cursor and I can look at my files, I can make edits. I can also look at my version control and do pretty much everything without having to do everything via the terminal interface.

And then I can even... Jump into that same Herdr session, but you could also use that in separate terminals, right? So you could, for example, just leave this in here, leave this open, have another terminal session here on the right where you do your coding, and then you just use Visual Studio Code in order to navigate your files, look at your project, or maybe handle your commits and PRs. All right, and that brings us to the end of this setup.

You now know how to set up a virtual private machine, how to connect to it, how to install your coding agents on that, but then even open it up in Visual Studio Code or Cursor to start working with it. As a last tip, I have a daily workflow document over here that explains and summarizes how you work with this on a daily basis, how to connect to it, how to add your projects, how to preview web apps. So if you, for example, run something on a local host on your server, how you can port that to your own device so you can check it, just a bunch of little tips.

And then with that, we can wrap up this video. So if you found it helpful, please leave a like and consider subscribing and make sure to check out my full Herdr tutorial and configuration here. That goes way deeper into the setup, the configurations, everything that I do to make Herdr my daily drive.