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I have two computers that I use for development, one at home and one at the office. I use Aptana Studio 3 on both machines and would like to be able to easily work on a single project from both computers.

What are some easy ways to transport the project between computers. Right now I am just using a USB drive to transfer the files between computers.

Also, I'm using a local apache server on one computer, and a local IIS server on the other.

MikeJerome
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4 Answers4

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I think you should use something like SVN, GIT, Mercurial and so on. I suggest you this software to manage your project:

Tortoise

Aurelio De Rosa
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  • +1: version control is so much more than just version control. You can almost count on being able to specify certain files to not be version controlled, so that whenever you commit everything you're not overwriting the server-specific files. –  Oct 06 '11 at 00:00
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You might try connecting remotely (via Remote Desktop Connection for example) from home to the office computer and in this way you will only work on the office one and there will be no need for file transfer.

Alternatively, you can setup a source control server (by using SVN for example) and commit your projects to it. This way, you will be able to work on them from multiple locations.

Florin Dumitrescu
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  • The remote desktop idea is useful, but is it really feasible to connect from home to the office, which is usually behind an intranet? I thought it should be the other way around. – prusswan Oct 06 '11 at 00:04
  • More feasible, I would think, than connecting to a home computer which probably doesn't have a fixed IP address... (I have that problem) –  Oct 06 '11 at 00:07
  • @prusswan, technically it can be the other way around, but I supposed that most of the work is actually done from the office and it would have made sense to work locally from there. A VPN setup at the office would solve the connectivity problem from a technical point of view. The problem might come from company's policies, which might prevent accessing work created at the work from outside, but if such policies would be in place, I am sure they won't like to hear about the USB drive either. – Florin Dumitrescu Oct 06 '11 at 00:13
  • @bdares [DDNS](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_DNS) might help you solve your problem – Florin Dumitrescu Oct 06 '11 at 00:14
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if you have the opportunity to use a (virtual) server, and remote desktop from both computers, you won't come back to another solution. Overall with a server-side language like php, it's ideal, as you have your repository on your test web server (lamp/wamp) directly. That ensure ONE version for all your tools, easy and faster backups, synch, etc.

If I had no access to a virtual remote server, I would use github as an alternative, for the sake of code base security, and decent synch times. But I'm no expert on github.

roselan
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  • If I set up a test server, could I somehow just connect Aptana to the files from both machines so I wouldn't have to remote in? – MikeJerome Oct 06 '11 at 19:10
  • you can, and there are several methods (google it). the simplest is described [here](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6201939/how-connect-to-remote-host-from-aptana-studio-3) – roselan Oct 06 '11 at 19:56
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Staging Environment

The best situation in your case will be to have a separate staging machine which is accessible to all three development machines. This can be another machine you control, one of the development boxes available to all of the others, or an external host - you can get a dedicated virtual machine from cloud providers for as little at $10/month, or if your project is simple enough use a plain web host even more cost-effectively.

Source Code Manager

A source code manager is a good start - SVN is common and free. Git is another and can even be set up to do remote deployments. These tools will give you two benefits:

  1. Shared code between all environments, always up to date
  2. Protection against data loss and error - if something major breaks revert to a working copy

File Synchronization

Finally, a tool like Dropbox can synchronize your files across all three systems as you make changes. Again, this one is free and can be installed on most operating systems.

Mike
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