Running a basic test server

Before you begin

Make sure that billing is enabled for your Google Cloud project.

Enable the Compute Engine API.

Create Linux VM instance

Create a VM instance

In the Google Cloud console, go to the Create an instance page.

Select operating system

In the Boot disk section, click Change to begin configuring your boot disk.

On the Public images tab, choose Ubuntu from the Operating system list.

Choose Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from the Version list.

Click Select.

Firewall

In the Firewall section, select Allow HTTP traffic.

Create

To create the VM, click Create.

Allow a short period of time for the instance to start. After the instance is ready, it's listed on the VM instances page with a green status icon.

Connect to the VM instance

Choose VM instance

In the VM instances page choose your instance.

Connect via SSH

In the list of virtual machine instances, click SSH in the row of the instance that you want to connect to.

Install Apache

Install packages

To update the available packages and install the apache2 package, use the system package manager for that operating system. To update an Ubuntu VM, run the following command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt -y install apache2

Start server

After installing Apache, the operating system automatically starts the Apache server.

Verify that Apache is running

To verify that Apache is running run the following command:

sudo systemctl status apache2

Prepare for browser testing

Overwrite the Apache web server default web page:

echo '<!doctype html><html><body><h1>QUAK Hello!</h1></body></html>' | sudo tee /var/www/html/index.html

Test your server

Test that your VM is serving traffic on its external IP address.

Choose VM instance

In the Google Cloud console, go to the VM Instances page.

Copy the external IP for your VM under the External IP column.

Open browser

In a browser, navigate to http://[EXTERNAL-IP]. Don't connect using https because this causes the server to return a Connection Refused error.

Result

You should now see the page with the following text:

QUAK Hello!