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

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

#11

Post by falcolas »

Vim, mostly. The customization is remarkably easy, just copy my .vimrc and .vim out to the server. I have a folder containing all of my dot files which I sync between servers, and a simple bash script which creates softlinks to them in my home directory.

However, I don't do remote development as much anymore since I picked up the habit of using Vagrant locally. Now I can edit the files locally (though still with Vim), and debug them on a local VM. Throw in Salt and Ansible for orchestration, and once I get my local VM working, I know my remote end will work as well.

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

#13

Post by filsmick »

vegancap wrote: post #10

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.

Sure, that's ideal, but what if you have a small laptop? It would be nice to make use of the power of your server to compile more quickly, and speed up your development cycle, right?

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

#16

Post by filsmick »

falcolas wrote: post #11

Vim, mostly. The customization is remarkably easy, just copy my .vimrc and .vim out to the server. I have a folder containing all of my dot files which I sync between servers, and a simple bash script which creates softlinks to them in my home directory. However, I don't do remote development as much anymore since I picked up the habit of using Vagrant locally. Now I can edit the files locally (though still with Vim)…

Correct me if I'm wrong, as I'm not experienced with these tools: when you're done, you upload the image to a server?

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

#18

Post by simon_vetter »

filsmick wrote: post #13
vegancap wrote: post #10

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.

Sure, that's ideal, but what if you have a small laptop? It would be nice to make use of the power of your server to compile more quickly, and speed up your development cycle, right?

have a buildbot/jenkins set up which runs your test suite on a buildslave automatically when you push to a git branch?

I would still run my editor locally (your pick. I use vim almost exclusively).

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

#20

Post by tomkinstinch »

On projects too small to have a workflow for automated deployment (let's be real: not everything is worth the overhead of setting up all of those tools), I've found the duo of Sublime and ExpanDrive[1] works well. The latter mounts a server that is accessible via SSH as a local drive (it's essentially a nice GUI for something like sshfs).

Otherwise, some combination of tmux and vim/nano/emacs.

1. http://www.expandrive.com/expandrive

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