Thursday, January 04, 2007

Remote editing using Eclipse DSDP/Target Management


Last year I was looking for an SSH/SCP/SFTP plugin for Eclipse. I figured it would be great to connect to my favourite Linux servers using Eclipse so that I can edit and transfer files directly from within Eclipse itself, over a secure channel. Back then I tried a couple of plugins but nothing worked good. I eventually gave up and reverted to working locally, with the SSH shell.

Then I stumbled upon this juicy nugget on the Eclipse newcomers group and it's exactly what I was looking for. I installed the RSE and it works exactly as expected. Using the SFTP connection method, I can connect to my servers, browse my files, open and edit PHP, HTML and other various text files using my favorite editor tools seamlessly in Eclipse as though they were local. Opening the file triggers a download, saving the file triggers an upload.

To use RSE, just follow these steps:
  1. Using the Update Manager, add an Update site, using this URL: http://download.eclipse.org/dsdp/tm/updates/
  2. Browse the TM update site, and install the RSE runtime.
  3. Restart your workspace
  4. Open the Remote System Explorer perspective, then create a new connection by right-clicking the Remote Systems pane.
  5. Browse, open, edit, save.
Although I'm not about to abandon my trusty Linux shell, RSE provides a great interface for those users who need to manipulate files on a Linux/Unix server.

5 Comments:

Blogger Jon the Canadian said...

Thanks for this post. Came up on a Google search and I was able to get connected very quickly. It's very helpful.

10:47 AM  
Blogger Aiza Bautista said...

This post has been removed by the author.

10:55 PM  
Blogger Aiza Bautista said...

Uber helpful post. Thanks for sharing!

10:59 PM  
Blogger steven said...

although the pdt/eclipse people try as hard as possible to obscure it in their docs, there is actually an even more useful way to use this:

http://wiki.eclipse.org/TM_and_RSE_FAQ#Working_with_TM_.2F_RSE_as_a_User

this gives you remote editing in-place within the context of a project (ie so you can also use xdebug and also click to navigate within the code).

it is incredibly useful, esp for folks like me that dont have a way to mount their ISP files other than with something like SftpDrive (which is ok but why bother with yet-another install).

havent tried it for long but it seems to do the right things and will be my stardard mo for this project at least.

thought i would share it because the eclipse docs are such a mess; the ide is great but the doc ppl seem more interested in sounding intelligent and buttoned-down than being useful for those who dont work on their projects.

i search a long time and across this post so i figured others would go this route and it might help.

cheers!

10:53 PM  
Blogger Rajendra said...

Seems very interesting and useful plugin for eclipse. We were using a seperate tool called Bluefish for editing remote files till now. Hopefully we don't need to use that for remote file editing if we install and use TM(RSE) plugin

6:24 AM  

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