Yes, You Can Code on an iPad: VS Code Server + Cloudflare + OpenAI

People love to say “you can’t develop on an iPad.” Cute take. I’m happily writing, linting, testing, and committing from a 2nd-gen 11” iPad Pro because the browser is just a window, and my homelab does the heavy lifting. The trick… run VS Code Server in the lab, publish it with Cloudflare Tunnel, and sign into the OpenAI VS Code extension using a tiny SSH port-forward. Resourcefulness > excuses.

What’s running

Proxmox with a small RHEL/Rocky 9 VM (my “ctrl” box)

VS Code Server (aka code-server) running under my user (“ghost”)

Cloudflared on a host in the lab (already logged in to Cloudflare)

Cloudflare Access protecting a pretty hostname (only my account can enter)

OpenAI VS Code extension for inline help & commands

Install VS Code Server

Install VS Code Server (under your user), don’t run it as root if you want themes/extensions to stick.

# As your normal user (e.g., ghost)
curl -fsSL https://code-server.dev/install.sh | sh
systemctl --user enable --now code-server

Publish Cloudflare Tunnel

On the machine running cloudflared add an ingress rule that points to the VS Code Server VM / IP:

# /root/.cloudflared/config.yml
ingress:
  - hostname: code.your-domain.com
    service: http://<local IP>:8080
  - service: http_status:404

systemctl restart cloudflared
journalctl -u cloudflared -f

Open AI extension sign in via SSH port-forward

You can do this right from the iPad using Termius (or whatever terminal emulator you prefer). Assuming there’s no Gnome or KDE, the OpenAI VS Code extension uses a local OAuth callback at http://127.0.0.1:1455. On a headless server, “127.0.0.1” is the server’s loopback, not your iPad’s. Bridge them with a one-liner from any device that can SSH into the server (laptop or an SSH app on iPad).

ssh -N \
  -L 127.0.0.1:1455:127.0.0.1:1455 \
  ghost@192.168.1.30

Locate the OpenAI extension and install it. Click Sign in in the OpenAI extension panel, complete the flow, close the SSH tunnel (Ctrl-D). You won’t need it again unless you re-auth. Developing on an iPad isn’t a stunt, it’s just good separation of concerns. The tablet is the window; the homelab is the workshop. With VS Code Server, Cloudflare Tunnel, and a tiny SSH trick for OAuth, the setup is clean, secure, and fast.

An extra step is installing OpenAI Codex right into your host terminal using the same loopback method. The commands differ depending on your OS, here’s a link to the docs.