How could it look like to work with remote machine

This post gathers my notes on how to simplify development work on a remote machine. There is a bunch of various methods on this, I choose one, the simpliest for me: sshfs.

My context is the following:

[Laptop]<--- ssh --->[Remote Machine]
Mac OSX               Ubuntu 16.04

I want to store files at the remote machine and edit them with PyCharm, Jupyter Notebook, etc.

Primitive configuration: ~/.ssh/config

The very simpliest setup to connect faster to the remote machine with ssh is to configure a ~/.ssh/config file. For example:

Host XXXXX  # A machine name, e.g. supermachine
    HostName XX.XX.XX.XX  # IP   
    Port XXXXX # SSH Port, e.g. 22
    User XXXXX # User name, e.g. ubuntu
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa
    LocalForward 8888 0.0.0.0:8888  # Port forwarding for jupyter

Once connected to the remote machine, we can use nano, vim to create/edit files. Or launch Jupyter Notebook from remote machine:

jupyter notebook --port=8888 --ip=0.0.0.0 --no-browser

and open a browser on the laptop with the URL: 0.0.0.0:8888/tree

Why not…

Mount remote file system with sshfs

Another way to expose the filesystem of the remote machine in your laptop is with sshfs. On Mac OSX one can simply use brew to install it:

brew install sshfs

Then mount remote filesystem with an example command (if you have already configured ~/.ssh/config file):

sshfs supermachine:/home/ubuntu/ /Users/USER/supermachine/ 

Once this is done, I use PyCharm to create/edit files directly on the remote machine.

To run a script on the remote machine, I still need to connect with ssh on the machine and run manually the script.

Still, why not …