How To Access Eclipse workspace remotely from Ubuntu?

Question

See title.

I am running Ubuntu 12.04, the target machine holding the Eclipse workspace I want to access is running Scientific linux.

Is it possible to work from within Eclipse remotely?

Update To phrase things more clearly (Yes, I am aware of ssh and sshfs!), Is there a way to:

(1) open Eclipse on the remote machine and manipulate workspace / projects from within there or

(2) run Eclipse on my machine then ssh into the remote workspace to manipulate it there?

Solution

If you want to get into a remote box the best method I know of is using SSH/SFTP.

Inside nautilus you can mount a drive as if it was a local drive and once you do that you could potentially open up an Eclipse project.

If it is on your local LAN you could maybe even do FTP instead since it would be faster, but I usually just stick with SFTP since it is fast enough for me when ever I need to work with a project even on a remote system several hundred miles away.

Here is a link on how to install an SSH server on what ever system is hosting the files.

http://tuxtweaks.com/2012/07/install-ssh-sftp-server-ubuntu-linux-mint/ Here is another tutorial https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/openssh-server.html

Basically if you want a working default setup just use this command

sudo apt-get install openssh-server

and connect with

ssh usernameonremote@remoteIPAddress

The ip address should be the local LAN address if your working that way if not you might need to work with your router.

You can also now mount easily with nautilus if you open a nautilus window and click connect to server.

If you plan on running this all the time you might need to consult some security manuals. I am not a security expert and I use this setup only locally.

Good luck, hope this helps.

UPDATE If you want to edit something remotely with Eclipse that isn't really a Ubuntu/Linux question, but its easy enough to do from what I have read. I don't personally use Eclipse for this because I prefer Netbeans.

Take a look at this https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4216822/work-on-a-remote-project-with-eclipse-via-ssh

Comments

[Jose Silva]

You can use ssh + sshfs. Any reason not to?

[Lie Ryan]

I hadn't tested this out, but you should be able to put the workspace into Ubuntu One or Dropbox and work with that, it shouldn't cause any issues as long as only one machine is opening the same workspace at the same time. Although you might want to cherry pick the folders which get synchronized and which ones don't or you might be using up more bandwidth/disk space than you really need.

[FSchmidt]

@nickguletskii see update for what exactly I'm looking for!

[FSchmidt]

@LieRyan I might have to go with that option. It doesn't seem as if eclipse can switch into a remote workspace that's 'just' being accessed over ssh.

[Lie Ryan]

While sshfs or gvfs should work as well because those access method are transparent, i.e. eclipse would not be able to distinguish files accessed over sshfs or gvfs from local files. The reason I generally avoid doing that for complex apps like eclipse is that eclipse probably aren't designed with the latency profile of sshfs/gvfs (high latency, in the range of 200-1000milliseconds) vs local hard disk (comparatively much lower latency, in the range of microseconds), and some programs may be excessively slower when accessing files over remote mounted disk.

[Lie Ryan]

However ultimately, I'm doubtful that you actually want to share the workspace though. IMO, setting up a version control repository and having a way to recreate development environment into new machines is generally better than syncing the whole workspace.

[FSchmidt]

" once you do that you could potentially open up an Eclipse project" - that is exactly my question. is there a way to (1) open Eclipse on the remote machine and manipulate workspace / projects from within there or (2) run Eclipse on my machine then ssh into the remote workspace to manipulate it there?

[FSchmidt]

see update of question! thanks for detailed answer.