Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#1

Post by filsmick » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 11:57 AM UTC

It seems there are a thousand solutions for remote editing, but none is perfect. Cloud9, git, rsync, rmate, vim or emacs on the server (but you don't have your familiar setup unless you sync it), FTP, scp...

What do you, professional developers, use for you day-to-day work on remote servers? My thought was that vim / emacs / rmate + Sublime for configuration files and git for well-defined projects were the norm, but I'm curious about what people use for their work.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#2

Post by Revell » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 12:20 PM UTC

For me, it's a combination of tmux and vim. Deployments are done using Puppet/Ansible, so no need to manually run any git commands. Also, I hardly ever really manually change anything on remote servers and if I do, I make sure to put it in Puppet/Ansible immediately after.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#3

Post by auganov » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 12:20 PM UTC

TRAMP mode in emacs let's you edit remote files, do dired etc through ssh, so that mitigates the dotfile syncing problem.

edit: also sshfs, tho that isn't always a smooth experience

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#4

Post by drKarl » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 12:23 PM UTC

Well, if for work you mean programming, you either work locally with a full IDE and deploy to a server, or if you have to work remotely then zsh + tmux + vim, and put some time in learning all three, and superpower them with the plugins you need. Ideally you do both, that is, learn how to use efficiently zsh, tmux and vim, and maintain your dotfiles, experiment with some plugins to have your curated list of plugins, and then if you need to work remotely you will feel comfortable, and when possible you can work locally on an IDE. If you do that, you will install Vim plugins for your editor of choice anyway (Vrapper for Eclipse or Vim plugins for IntelliJ Idea, or for Atom, Sublime, etc). There are also some plugins to remote-edit files in editors like Atom or Sublime

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#5

Post by angdis » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 12:43 PM UTC

For when the shit really hits the fan... a terminal server connected to serial port and remote power control for power cycling are indispensable.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#6

Post by Avalaxy » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 12:45 PM UTC

I see no reason to develop on a server. If that's what you're doing, that's a very bad sign in most of the cases.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#7

Post by Famicoman » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 1:19 PM UTC

I do as much development in a local IDE as possible. From there I just depend on git and ssh. Screen makes things a little more manageable as well.

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#8

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 1:33 PM UTC

Famicoman wrote: post #7

I do as much development in a local IDE as possible. From there I just depend on git and ssh. Screen makes things a little more manageable as well.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#9

Post by filsmick » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 1:33 PM UTC

Famicoman wrote: post #7

I do as much development in a local IDE as possible. From there I just depend on git and ssh. Screen makes things a little more manageable as well.

by 'depend on ssh', do you mean you ssh into the server and use a command-line editor?

Re: Ask HN: How do you work efficiently on remote servers?

#10

Post by vegancap » Fri, Mar 27, 2015, 1:37 PM UTC

I'd argue you shouldn't be working on remote servers at all. Ideally you should be working locally and deploy using Capistrano, Jenkins, Bamboo or git hooks etc.