Back in 2017 I decided to move my passion project After Dark off GitHub so I could have better repo usage insights. I was surprised to learn how much faster a self-hosted VCS was compared to GitHub. Not only was GitHub limiting the useful metrics I could capture they were actually slowing down my development!
Which brings me back to one of if not the most important concepts I learned as a developer after watching a talk given by Paul Irish at Fluent Conf 2012.
About a year ago I explained how to set-up Remote Projects in Eclipse. Since then I’ve ditched Eclipse in favor of Sublime Text. But, even with the cat’s pajamas of modern code editors (that’s Sublime), getting source files from development to production meant carrying around some extra baggage:
- A deployment process, often manual, or, if automated, tightly coupled with the application sources (zomg! oh n0s!!), must be created and followed.
- At least two environments, likely not running on the same platform, must be stood-up and carried: development and production.
- Windows users, who may not have a good method for developing for today’s Linux-based hosting environments, are pretty much snowed from the get-go.
I’m deliberately oversimplifying here for the sake of TL;DR, so let me get the point. If you’re running a small site, are capable of failing fast and failing often, don’t have a lot of code contributors or are for some reason stuck working on an IBM Aptiva with 16MB RAM upgrade, you can pretty much skip the pain points in the list above and just manage code directly on the web server remotely. How is that possible? Simple. SFTP to Ubuntu server with Sublime Text as explained in this article.