RoR: Mac + Textmate + SSHfs = Remote Development

By Daniel Miessler on March 29th, 2007: Tagged as OS X | Programming | RoR | Ruby | SSH

I recently started a major programming project using RoR and had to make the requisite decisions involving programming environments.

I elected to go with Textmate, as it was strongly recommended by two of the best RoR programmers in the world. But upon opening the application I realized that, unlike BBEdit which I normally use, Textmate doesn’t have the ability to open remote files via FTP or SSH.

Textmate

Luckily there’s a workaround: if you install MacFuse and SSHfs, you can mount your remote Rails filestructure as a drive on your local system. Now I simply code using Textmate as if everything was local and Textmate doesn’t know the difference.

Browse –> Open –> Code –> Save –> Enjoy.:





--



6 Comments »

  1. This is a good tool. No doubt.

    Yet I wonder if it doesn’t encourage some dangerous attitudes practices.

    1. Revision control.

    Yikes. I love the convenience of being able to edit remotely, but unless your remote directory is RC-protected, you run the real risk of shooting yourself in the foot.

    Now yes, yes, yes, I know that you can get around this by using SVN on your mounted dir, but I think that most people ( at least when I was using mounted shares on windows this was the practice ) just open the share, make an edit, and move on. Or think “oh this is just a teensy change….”.

    That may be more of a problem with the developer and not the tool…

    1. The Rails Model

    Develop locally and then use a deployment technology. 37Signals grew out the “Capistrano” tool which is a master of deployments ( imagine Rake SSH ). This makes deployment easier and allows you to make incremental bug fixes ( plus re-deploy ) AND offers integration into SVN (*checkout tag with such and such value and pull that out and then take that content and send it over to foobar.domain.com pointing to database rorisgreat_development ).

    http://manuals.rubyonrails.com/read/book/17

    1. Ultimately this model of interface is what I have adopted for my WordPress install. I have installed it locally, mangle with Textmate and do the endless reloads locally ( with SVN on the dir ) and THEN i deploy remotely. While I have no capistrano, all my work is in a theme so it’s not too painful to tar up that and upload it.

    Comment by Steven G. Harms — 3/29/2007 @ 9:34 am

    1. Actually, we’re looking into using Subversion for just this reason. My understanding is that we can use my method but on a dev copy of the code.

    2. I wasn’t aware of that; I’ll check that out.

    3. Interesting…I’m going to check this out too…

    Comment by Daniel Miessler — 3/29/2007 @ 10:52 am

  3. Daniel,

    Aren’t you a huge VIM proponent? How do you decide whether to use VIM, BBEdit, or TextMate when confronted with an editing/coding task?

    Comment by Tony Vance — 3/29/2007 @ 1:07 pm

  4. A very good question, Tony. The short answer is that those who I respect said it was the way to go for RoR, and I believe them.

    If I were to have had to make this decision without the benefit of input from this quality of mentor (e.g. the creator of Rails himself), I’d probably have chosen to use either Eclipse or Vim. But everything I’ve seen on the subject points me toward Textmate being the correct answer.

    So, when in doubt, see what those with more experience are doing and mimic it… :) Once I get a good feel for things I’ll be able to form my own opinion, but until then I’m going to yield to current wisdom.

    Cheers,

    -Daniel

    Comment by Daniel Miessler — 3/29/2007 @ 1:27 pm

  5. Daniel–thanks for the insight. Great blog by the way–it’s consistently high quality with useful/interesting content.

    Comment by Tony Vance — 4/1/2007 @ 5:52 pm

  6. And thanks for commenting. :) You’ve got an interesting site as well.

    Cheers,

    -Daniel

    Comment by Daniel Miessler — 4/3/2007 @ 12:02 am

RSS Feed For This Post...
This Post's TrackBack URI

Leave a Comment...