Work on a remote project with Eclipse via SSH

Question

I have the following boxes:

1. A Windows box with Eclipse CDT,
2. A Linux box, accessible for me only via SSH.

Both the compiler and the hardware required to build and run my project is only on machine B.

I'd like to work "transparently" from a Windows box on that project using Eclipse CDT and be able to build, run and debug the project remotely from within the IDE.

How do I set up that:

• The building will work? Any simpler solutions than writing a local makefile which would rsync the project and then call a remote makefile to initiate the actual build? Does Eclipse managed build have a feature for that?
• The debugging will work?
• Preferably - the Eclipse CDT code indexing will work? Do I have to copy all required header files from machine B to machine A and add them to include path manually?

Answer 1

I had the same problem 2 years ago and I solved it in the following way:

1) I build my projects with makefiles, not managed by eclipse 2) I use a SAMBA connection to edit the files inside Eclipse 3) Building the project: Eclipse calles a "local" make with a makefile which opens a SSH connection to the Linux Host. On the SSH command line you can give parameters which are executed on the Linux host. I use for that parameter a makeit.sh shell script which call the "real" make on the linux host. The different targets for building you can give also by parameters from the local makefile --> makeit.sh --> makefile on linux host.

Answer 2

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 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.

Answer 3

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.

Answer 4

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?

Answer 5

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.

Answer 6

For this case you can use ptp eclipse https://eclipse.org/ptp/ for source browsing and building.

You can use this pluging to debug your application

http://marketplace.eclipse.org/content/direct-remote-c-debugging