Remote projects in Eclipse

Remote projects in Eclipse can be a great way of managing websites from thin clients and sites with existing backup processes in place. To create a remote project use RSE to establish a new connection using one of the available connection types, such as SSH. (Note: SSH may need to be explicitly enabled via the site’s web hosting control panel to function correctly with Eclipse.) Once a remote connection is established successfully, open up the Remote Systems view and drill down into the site via the tree view control. Find the the folder containing your desired project starting point, open its context menu and choose the Create Remote Project option to create a new remote project in Eclipse.

Once the remote project is finished syncing, it will appear in the Project and Package Explorer views. Opening the context menu for a remote project from one of the Explorer views will bring up additional options, such as project type configuration. The same menu also provides easy access to the Remote Systems view, helpful for file transfers.

Visit the Target Management page at Eclipse.org to learn more.

  • Jeremy McCormick

    Have you found a way to specify dependencies of the remote projects?  Say I have a Maven project with a complicated dependency tree.  Is there any way to get the remote project to find all of these, so that everything isn’t underlined in red in the editor and code completion works?  RSE is a great tool, but this is what I’m struggling to figure out right now…

  • http://www.habdas.org/ Josh Habdas

    Thanks for your question, Jeremy, and sorry it took so long to respond. I wasn’t using Maven with Eclipse at the time when this post was written, and could not provide a response to your question. Not sure if you’ve had any breakthroughs since then, but as I move some of my projects onto the cloud using Sublime Text (my new editor of preference) I’ll likely be looking into questions related to build processes.

    My first plan is to experiment with Brunch.io and see if I can get it to monitor a remote file system using its “watch” command, and then try to leverage the auto-reload functionality on a remote browser. For the task I’ll likely be using a MV* stack based on Backbone. I’m also considering giving Derby a try for SEO reasons, though I’m not crazy about their decision to use the HTML markup approach. We’ll see what happens, but please stay tuned if you have related interests.