Linux Dev Tunnel for Remote Dev Environment

Published: November 5, 2025

By popular demand I’m writing this article about setting up a Dev Tunnel that is hosted on a Linux machine. Truth be told, I think I prefer the Linux Dev Tunnel experience to the Windows Dev Tunnels - the Linux tunnels seem more stable. The instructions are very similar to the Windows steps, with obvious adjustments:

If you want, you can read the Windows Instructions

Run all these commands on your Linux/host/remote machine - I did this on a new Ubuntu 25 server:

Install Git: (git was already installed for me)

sudo apt install git

Install the GitHub CLI:

sudo apt install gh

Login to GitHub using the CLI:

gh auth login

Setup git user info:

git config --global user.name "John Doe"

git config --global user.email johndoe@example.com

Install the .NET SDK:

wget https://packages.microsoft.com/config/debian/12/packages-microsoft-prod.deb -O packages-microsoft-prod.deb
sudo dpkg -i packages-microsoft-prod.deb
rm packages-microsoft-prod.deb

sudo apt-get update && \
  sudo apt-get install -y dotnet-sdk-9.0

Documentation from Microsoft about installing the .NET SDK on Ubuntu: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/core/install/linux-debian?tabs=dotnet9

Install VS Code CLI:

Get CLI files

curl -L "https://code.visualstudio.com/sha/download?build=stable&os=cli-alpine-x64" -o "vscode-cli-linux-x64.tar.gz"

Create new directory for the CLI

mkdir -p ~/.local/bin

Extract the download file to the new directory

tar -xvzf vscode-cli-linux-x64.tar.gz --directory ~/.local/bin

Add the CLI to your PATH. This way you can run ‘code’ commands

echo 'export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.bashrc

Apply the changes to your current session. (After reboot ‘code’ will be available)

source ~/.bashrc

Start Tunnel

Running this command will prompt you to sign in to GitHub and allow VS Code access to your GitHub account. Follow the instructions on the terminal to complete the authentication setup. On completing those steps you will be given a URL that you can open on your client machine (my iPad in my case). When you open the URL, you will be prompted to authenticate it GitHub - complete those steps.

code tunnel

Starting the tunnel can be repetitive. I wanted my tunnel to run as a service and always available. Setup Dev Tunnel as a service to start automatically at boot:

code tunnel service install

Lingering

Enable lingering is necessary because it ensures the user’s systemd session (User Manager) persists after they log out from the server (e.g., close the SSH connection).

Without lingering enabled:

The user’s session is killed upon logout by the systemd-logind service.
The VS Code tunnel, which is installed as a systemd –user service, is dependent on this user session.
When the user session dies, the code tunnel process is also killed, and the tunnel stops running.

Enabling lingering tells the system to keep that User Manager instance active, allowing the VS Code tunnel service to run 24/7 in the background without an active login session:

sudo loginctl enable-linger [USERNAME]

Microsoft Documentation on Tunnels: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/tunnels

Stay awesome!