Setting Up Hetzner Dev Infrastructure

Overview

Prerequisites and first-time setup for working with this repo.

Prerequisites

Install required tools:

brew install hcloud direnv nix

First-Time Setup

Step 1: Create hcloud context

hcloud context create workstation
# Enter your API token when prompted

Get token from: https://console.hetzner.cloud → Project → Access → API Tokens → Generate (Read & Write)

Step 2: Allow direnv

cd ~/Code/workstation
direnv allow

This loads HCLOUD_TOKEN from your hcloud CLI context.

Verify Setup

# Check token is loaded
echo $HCLOUD_TOKEN | head -c 10

# Check hcloud can connect
hcloud server list

Common Issues

"context not found"

hcloud context list
# If empty:
hcloud context create workstation

"direnv: error .envrc"

direnv allow

Python version error

The .envrc requires Python 3.11+ for tomllib. Check:

python3 --version

SSH Key Setup

Ensure your SSH key is registered with Hetzner:

hcloud ssh-key list
# If 'devbox' key is missing:
hcloud ssh-key create --name devbox --public-key-from-file ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub