Work on a remote project with Eclipse via SSH

Question

Try the Remote System Explorer (RSE). It's a set of plug-ins to do exactly what you want.

RSE may already be included in your current Eclipse installation. To check in Eclipse Indigo go to Window > Open Perspective > Other... and choose Remote System Explorer from the Open Perspective dialog to open the RSE perspective.

To create an SSH remote project from the RSE perspective in Eclipse:

1. Define a new connection and choose SSH Only from the Select Remote System Type screen in the New Connection dialog.
2. Enter the connection information then choose Finish.
3. Connect to the new host. (Assumes SSH keys are already setup.)
4. Once connected, drill down into the host's Sftp Files, choose a folder and select Create Remote Project from the item's context menu. (Wait as the remote project is created.)

If done correctly, there should now be a new remote project accessible from the Project Explorer and other perspectives within eclipse. With the SSH connection set-up correctly passwords can be made an optional part of the normal SSH authentication process. A remote project with Eclipse via SSH is now created.

The very simplest way would be to run Eclipse CDT on the Linux Box and use either X11-Forwarding or remote desktop software such as VNC.

This, of course, is only possible when you Eclipse is present on the Linux box and your network connection to the box is sufficiently fast.

The advantage is that, due to everything being local, you won't have synchronization issues, and you don't get any awkward cross-platform issues.

If you have no eclipse on the box, you could thinking of sharing your linux working directory via SMB (or SSHFS) and access it from your windows machine, but that would require quite some setup.

Both would be better than having two copies, especially when it's cross-platform.

I'm in the same spot myself (or was), FWIW I ended up checking out to a samba share on the Linux host and editing that share locally on the Windows machine with notepad++, then I compiled on the Linux box via PuTTY. (We weren't allowed to update the ten y/o versions of the editors on the Linux host and it didn't have Java, so I gave up on X11 forwarding)

Now... I run modern Linux in a VM on my Windows host, add all the tools I want (e.g. CDT) to the VM and then I checkout and build in a chroot jail that closely resembles the RTE.

It's a clunky solution but I thought I'd throw it in to the mix.

My solution is similar to the SAMBA one except using sshfs. Mount my remote server with sshfs, open my makefile project on the remote machine. Go from there.

It seems I can run a GUI frontend to mercurial this way as well.

Building my remote code is as simple as: ssh address remote_make_command

I am looking for a decent way to debug though. Possibly via gdbserver?

I tried ssh -X but it was unbearably slow.

I also tried RSE, but it didn't even support building the project with a Makefile (I'm being told that this has changed since I posted my answer, but I haven't tried that out)

I read that NX is faster than X11 forwarding, but I couldn't get it to work.

Finally, I found out that my server supports X2Go (the link has install instructions if yours does not). Now I only had to:

• download and unpack Eclipse on the server,
• install X2Go on my local machine (sudo apt-get install x2goclient on Ubuntu),
• configure the connection (host, auto-login with ssh key, choose to run Eclipse).

Everything is just as if I was working on a local machine, including building, debugging, and code indexing. And there are no noticeable lags.