Clone a Cloud9 workspace into an SSH enabled setup

Question

My question concerns migrating a web app built in Flask to a Droplet.

I have built the app in a private workspace, using the Flask template in C9. Now it's been developed, I want to set up the app in a Digital Ocean droplet. To connect a brand new C9 SSH workspace to a droplet is fine; however, the SSH workspace by default does not have many of the dependencies (mySQL; Flask) and this is a major pain. I'm using a droplet with Ubuntu NodeJS 6.9.5 on 14.04.

Is there a way to have my existing private dev workspace cloned to an SSH workspace? It would be even better to have a single workspace maintained that syncs to the other, should I wish to take down the droplet for any reason.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Why can't you just image the disk, a digital copy of a working c9 to your new workplace, then use rsync to do increment sync.

rsync -azHAXxP -e 'ssh -p22' username@your-droplet-IP \ 
"dd if=/dev/sda of=myworking-droplet.iso bs=512 conv=noerror,sync"

Now that you have a full copy of working droplet as an image (.iso) file, you can copy this to any hard disk of your choice and boot into it.

Image your Cloud9 into USB

If your C9 filesize is less than 30G, you can copy this into usb drive and maintain a locally bootable copy, that is you can image this unto any larger USB and make it bootable, to achieve this do :

• Mount USB of bigger size than size of your iso.
• Check your mounted flash drive localtion with df -h, or lsblk -a

• Image your iso file to usb with :

  dd if=myworking-droplet of=/dev/sdb bs=512k conv=noerror,sync

Once finished, remove your drive, plug it into another PC, change the boot order to USB Drive and boot into your C9 locally

Sync Your Cloud9 workspace directory to another box

It gets better if you just want to sync your C9 workspace directory over SSH connection to another box, use:

`rsync -azHAXxP -e 'ssh -p22' username@your-droplet-IP:/path/to/your/workspace .`

The above will clone your workspace directory over to your current box. NOTE: The dot at the end of the command is necessary.

Mount your Cloud9 workspace to your local machine

Also you can mount your remote workspace file system to your local computer so you can make changes on the fly and treat your droplet as local storage, so you can work and access the same workspace locally without the need to login into your Cloud9 everytime you want to make changes or work on your project, to achieve this use:

• Install SSHFS if not already installed with :

  sudo apt-get install sshfs

• Create a local directory in which to mount the droplet's file system.

  sudo mkdir /mnt/mydroplet

• Mount your droplet with:

  sudo sshfs -o allow_other,defer_permissions \ root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/ /mnt/mydroplet

If your droplet is configured for login via ssh key authorization, use this:

`sudo sshfs -o allow_other,defer_permissions,IdentityFile=~/.ssh/id_rsa \
root@xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:/ /mnt/mydroplet`

Now you can work with files on your droplet as if it were a physical device attached to your local machine.

Testing your mount from your local machine:

`cd /mnt/mydroplet`

• Creat a test file

  touch TestFile.php

Now login into you Clound9 and verify that you can access and modify the newly created file i.e TestFile.php

Now you can code locally, it immediately appears on your C9, or upload files from your local machine to your Cloud9 by copy file to your locally mounted directory.