Dropbox
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We can use dropbox for efficient 2-way project sync!
This approach works for any IDE - atom or webstorm or vscode - they don't have to know about the remote filesystem.
This will allow us to write code locally and have the changes show up on the remote box.
Adding/deleting files will work
File permissions will be properly reflected
Configuring selective sync via the dropbox UI will prevent the transfer of bulky dependencies back to your local filesystem
such features are often difficult to setup or absent in other sync tools.
Tools like SourceTree can simply deal with our local filesystem without any knowledge of the remote filesystem.
Install Dropbox agent
for digitalocean 64-bit droplets with Ubuntu OS:
Link the machine by copy/pasting the URL from the output window into your browser. Here's a sample of what you'll see:
Once you are done linking, you will see the following output:
Leave the terminal window with dropboxd running in the foreground, as-is.
NOTE: dropboxd will start syncing everything in your dropbox account immediately, the next few steps will work to correct this behaviour.
Open a new ssh session with your remote machine and download the dropbox.py command-line tool so we may tell dropboxd to avoid syncing anything other than our code/projects.
Switch to your Dropbox directory and exclude any files that it has begun syncing:
Check the status: ~/bin/dropbox.py status
If its still trying to sync then every few minutes, rerun: cd ~/Dropbox/ && ~/bin/dropbox.py exclude add *
Keep running the status check again too: ~/bin/dropbox.py status
After the status check declares: Up to date
Run this command one last time to be sure: cd ~/Dropbox/ && ~/bin/dropbox.py exclude add *
Now the contents of your Dropbox directory should be empty: cd ~/Dropbox/ && ls
Feel free to take a look at everything which has been excluded: ~/bin/dropbox.py exclude list
If the directory you want to sync is also excluded, then remove it from exclude list by ~/bin/dropbox.py exclude remove [DIRECTORY] [DIRECTORY]
Now that we've excluded everything known to us, you can place any new code-related projects & folders into dropbox and they will sync between.
You probably don't want to host content out of your Dropbox folder, but there's a basic trick for mirroring Dropbox content outside of the Dropbox folder: create a symbolic link.
Example: ln -s /var/www/foo.com ~/Dropbox/foo.com
This will cause Dropbox to treat /var/www/foo.com as if it resided inside the Dropbox folder. All other clients will see foo.com as a folder within the Dropbox folder, and will transparently sync across that symlink.
We cannot count on keeping our first ssh session alive forever to run dropboxd so let's
As a safety measure, I thisismitch's gist in case it ever gets taken down.
As a convenience, on your remote box, you can edit ~/.bashrc to add an alias:
this will let you use shorthand like dropbox status instead of ~/bin/dropbox.py status
If you code using dropbox for sync long enough, you will run into an issue where dropbox will either crash or hang or both because of a limit on maximum number of files it can monitor for changes.
If you are lucky then the logs will magically pop-up on your console stating:
You can protect against this by what is going on. For example I found out that I had provided significantly less resources than what dropbox recommends!
Or you could simply go ahead and make the fix:
You're welcome ;)