Google Material Design Components on Ubuntu Server on Google Cloud - google-cloud-platform

Question

I cannot get Material Design Components to run on my virtual server. I have tried following their "quick start" page and their Material basics (Web 101) course to no avail. I am able to execute most of the steps in either tutorial, but I cannot see the JavaScript apply to the page. What am I doing wrong? I will detail my process below so that someone can hopefully spot my mistake.
First I create a VM instance on the Google Cloud Platform. It is a Ubuntu 18.04 LTS image with 1 CPU, 3.75 GB memory, and HTTP/HTTPS traffic allowed on the firewall.
Then I install Node.js and NPM on the machine.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs
sudo apt-get install npm
Then I clone the codelab from GitHub. (following Web 101 in this example)
git clone https://github.com/material-components/material-components-web-codelabs
...and navigate to the pertinent directory.
cd material-components-web-codelabs/mdc-101/starter
In that directory, I install NPM.
npm install
The install works just fine, save for one optional dependency called "/chokidar/fsevents" which is apparently for Mac OS X anyways.
From the same directory, I start NPM.
npm start
At this point, the tutorial says I should be able to reach the site. It says to navigate to http://localhost:8080/. Since I am installing this on a remote, cloud server, I replace "localhost" with the server's external IP. I invariably get a timeout error from the browser.

Answer 1

Ensure that the port 8080 is open and listening inside the VM instance by running telnet, nmap, or netstat commands.
$ telnet localhost 8080
$ nmap <external-ip-vm-instance>
$ netstat -plant
If it is not listening, then this means that the application was not installed correctly.
Look at the Firewall Rule in the GCP to make sure that the VM instance allows ingress traffic to the port 8080.
Since you are running Ubuntu, make sure that the default Ubuntu firewall did not block the port 8080. If so, you have to allow access to the port 8080 by running the following command:
$ sudo ufw allow 8080/tcp