On AWS

Markdown Open in Claude Open in ChatGPT

At the end, you have a box on Amazon Web Services (AWS), an EC2 instance in AWS's words, with Docker on it, and a Terminal on it from your laptop.

Set this up with your agent

Copy this to a coding agent on your laptop. It runs the commands and checks each step with you; what you sign in to, press or paste stays yours.

This is for a coding agent that can run commands on my laptop (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor), not a chat website.
Walk me through Loopgate's guide "On AWS": https://loopgate.dev/runner/guides/aws.md. The guides it links to are beside it, each ending in .md.
Run its commands yourself, on my laptop or on my box over SSH as the guide says, one step at a time, and check each "You should see" line before the next step.
These are mine: tell me when it is my turn, wait for me, and never ask me to type them into this chat. Signing in to anything (the portal, a cloud console, Slack, GitHub), pressing Add a runner, every token and password, my AI subscription's device code, and making the Slack app.
If I paste you the portal's install line, run it on the box: its token works once, for an hour.

At a glance

Time: 15 minutes, then Any Linux computer with Docker.

What you need:

An AWS account you can sign in to
About 30 to 35 dollars a month while the box runs

Steps:

Rent the box
Connect to it
Install Docker

Steps

Sign in to the AWS console, type EC2 in the search bar at the top and open it.
Check the region in the top right corner. Pick the one nearest your team.
Press Launch instance and fill it in:
- Name: loopgate-runner.
- Application and OS Images: Ubuntu, then Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS. Under Architecture, keep 64-bit (x86).
- Instance type: t3.medium (2 processors and 4 GB of memory).
- Key pair: press Create new key pair, name it loopgate, keep RSA and .pem, and press Create key pair. Your browser downloads loopgate.pem, the key to the box; keep it safe.
- Network settings: keep Allow SSH traffic from checked and change its menu from Anywhere to My IP. Leave Allow HTTPS traffic and Allow HTTP traffic unchecked, so nothing else comes in.
- Configure storage: 30 GiB.
Press Launch instance, then View all instances.
You should see: your instance with Instance state "Running" after a minute.
Select it and copy its Public IPv4 address, four numbers with dots such as 3.120.45.67.
On your laptop, in Terminal, lock the key file so only you can read it. SSH refuses a key that others can read.
```
chmod 400 ~/Downloads/loopgate.pem
```
Connect, with the address from step 5 in place of <address>.
```
ssh -i ~/Downloads/loopgate.pem ubuntu@<address>
```
You should see: a question about the box's fingerprint. Type yes and press Enter. Then a welcome message and a prompt that starts ubuntu@.
Install Docker with Docker's own script.
```
curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sudo sh
```
You should see: a few minutes of output ending with a note about running Docker as a non-root user.
Let your user run Docker without sudo.
```
sudo usermod -aG docker $USER
```
Leave with exit, then run the ssh command from step 7 again, so the change takes hold.

Check

Docker answers without sudo with Docker Compose version v2. followed by more numbers:

docker compose version

Your box is ready. Paste the command from the portal: Any Linux computer with Docker.

If something is off

SSH stops connecting one day. Your address at home or at the office changed. Edit the instance's security group and set the SSH rule to My IP again.
SSH says the key's permissions are too open. Run step 6 again.
Docker says permission denied. Leave and connect again (step 10).

Doing it by hand

Once Docker answers, By hand sets the runner up from files instead of the portal's line.