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Managed GRID Enterprise is the fastest way to get started: the GRID team provisions a cloud VM for your organization with the platform pre-installed and configured. All licensing, resource configuration, and container services are ready—you just connect with VS Code and begin working.

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Prerequisites

You should have received from the GRID team:
  • The public IP address (or DNS name) of the managed VM
  • An SSH private key (e.g., grid-enterprise.pem)
  • The username for the VM (typically grid or ubuntu)
If anything is missing, contact GRID support before proceeding.

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Setup

1

Prepare the SSH Key

Set restrictive permissions on your key file:
chmod 400 /path/to/grid-enterprise.pem
Move it to your SSH directory:
mv /path/to/grid-enterprise.pem ~/.ssh/
2

Configure SSH

Add the host to ~/.ssh/config:
Host grid-managed
    HostName <MANAGED_VM_IP>
    User grid
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/grid-enterprise.pem
Replace <MANAGED_VM_IP> with your VM’s IP address and adjust the username if different.
3

Install VS Code Extensions

Install VS Code with the Remote Development extension pack (includes Remote-SSH and Dev Containers).
4

Connect to the VM

  1. Open VS Code
  2. Press F1 and run Remote-SSH: Connect to Host…
  3. Select grid-managed
  4. Wait for the remote window to open (green status bar)

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Using GRID

Once connected, open a terminal in VS Code (Terminal > New Terminal) and use the GRID CLI: 
grid
The environment is pre-configured with GRID_DATA_DIR, license.json, and resource_config.json. Start using GRID immediately: 
login @local
init airgen @local
session start demo

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Accessing Interfaces

Use the open command to launch interfaces. The CLI displays URLs for both local and VM access: 
open nb @local
open sim @local
open viz @local
When working remotely, use the VM IP addresses shown in the output. VS Code’s built-in port forwarding (in the PORTS panel) can also forward specific ports to your local machine if needed.

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Developing in the Container

For a full IDE experience inside the running container: 
open code @local
Or manually attach via VS Code:
  1. Run Dev Containers: Attach to Running Container… from the Command Palette
  2. Select grid_core
See VS Code with GRID Containers for detailed instructions.

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Best Practices

  • Use terminate to shut down containers when finished
  • Leave the GRID_DATA_DIR contents in place—GRID support manages updates
  • Contact GRID before installing additional system packages to maintain compatibility

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Next Steps

Hello GRID Tutorial

Follow the step-by-step tutorial in your remote terminal.

CLI Reference

Learn all available GRID commands.