Building MIT App Inventor from Source on a Google Cloud VM without Vagrant

No Vagrant Required – Using a Google Cloud VM

We set up a Google Cloud Compute Engine VM for building MIT App Inventor from source without using Vagrant.

We previously used MIT’s recommended setup: Ubuntu 18.04 with Vagrant and VirtualBox on a local Mac. Builds frequently ran out of memory, making the setup inefficient, so we moved the build environment to a Google Cloud VM.

Running a cloud VM naturally raises the question of cost. With the configuration used here (N2, 4 vCPUs, 40 GB RAM, a 50 GB standard persistent disk, us-west1), the VM cost about $0.25 per hour, and a full build took about 30 minutes (as of August 26, 2026).

VM Configuration

The Google Cloud VM configuration is shown below. In the Google Cloud Console, open Compute Engine > VM instances, click Create instance. Click Start / Resume to boot it.

Google Cloud Compute Engine
OS:        Ubuntu 24.04 LTS Minimal
Machine:   N2 Custom
vCPU:      4
Memory:    40 GB
Disl:      50 GB
Swap:      16 GB

We chose 4 vCPUs and 40 GB of memory. On N2, assigning 40 GB of memory to a 2-vCPU VM causes more of the memory to be billed at the extended-memory rate, making the instance more expensive. The VM therefore has 4 vCPUs, but the build itself is limited to two CPUs with taskset.