So, I decided to finally give Cloud9 a try. All I can say is that it’s not exactly heaven up there, although for a free service with 512MB of RAM and 1 GB of hard drive space, one should not complain too much.

Cloud9 does have the individual user in mind in how they provide scripts like mysql-ctl and phpmyadmin-ctl to quickly start the service and install that very useful web app. You will be either very disappointed or very delighted to know that they do not allow SSH or MySQL connections remotely to your Cloud9 workspace. I can live with that. However, they don’t give you as much freedom as places like koding.com or codeanywhere.com, where you can connect remotely to your VM as well as straightforwardly configure httpd with conf file directives. Sticking an Alias to /phpmyadmin in my main configuration was not proving successful, so I just settled with their automated install.

One major point of critique for Cloud9 is their decision to not assign a password to the DB user. Even if you are using your workspace purely for development purposes, that is not a good reason to not regard the data as sensitive. You still would not want anyone who happens to know or figure out your username to mess with your stuff.

So, be sure to set your DB user password either through the mysql command line or phpmyadmin, and then make a change to the $dbpass value in /etc/phpmyadmin/config-db.php, where the phpmyadmin-ctl install command setup the site, to use your new password.