Slink: simple remote development environments over SSH

export SLINK_HOST=remote-devbox.mydomain.com

# sync the current directory to the remote machine:
slink sync up

# Run a command on the remote machine in the synced directory:
slink run "ls -la"

# SSH into the machine and change to the synced directory:
slink go

# Forward ports 8080 and 4443 on your local machine to the same ports on your
# remote machine:
slink forward 8080 4443

# Forward port 80 on your local machine to 80 on the remote machine -- slink
# will automatically prompt for sudo as necessary
slink forward 80

Slink is designed to make remote development environments simple and painless. It allows you to treat a remote machine as being a mirror of your local machine; it syncs directories, keeping your directory structure the same, opens shells on the remote machine in the directories that mirror your PWD, etc. It abstracts over SSH, rsync, and scp to provide a simple interface for interacting with a remote dev environment, and multiplexes connections for all of them over a single cached SSH connection for performance.

Slink assumes you want your remote machine to effectively mirror the directory structure of your local machine: the expectation is you're treating your remote like your local machine, but on [different hardware|a different OS|etc].

Commands

• slink go: SSH to the machine, switching to the mirror of PWD (if it exists).
• slink run <command>: runs a command on the machine. Automatically allocates a PTY for you to allow interactive commands to work corrrectly.
• slink forward <ports...>: forward ports from your local machine to the same ports on the remote machine.
• slink sync up: sync the current directory to the remote machine via rsync, maintaining relative path from $HOME if in $HOME, or from root otherwise.
• slink sync down: inverse of sync up.
• slink upload <file>: uploads a file to the remote, in the same relative location from $HOME if in $HOME, or from root otherwise. Also has an optional --to <file> flag, to upload the local file to an arbitrary path on the remote.
• slink download <file>: inverse of upload. Has an optional --from flag, to download the file from an arbitrary path on the remote.

Host configuration

To set a default host for Slink, edit your .bashrc (or .zshrc, or relevant file for your shell) to export the SLINK_HOST environment variable. From then on, all new shell sessions will use that host by default. For example:

Bash or Zsh:

# In your .bashrc or .zshrc:
export SLINK_HOST=remote-devbox.mydomain.com

Fish:

# In your config.fish
set -x SLINK_HOST remote-devbox.mydomain.com

Within a single shell session, you can use the same syntax to change the default host for the rest of the shell session:

Bash or Zsh:

# In any shell session:
export SLINK_HOST=remote-devbox.mydomain.com

Fish:

# In any shell session:
set -x SLINK_HOST remote-devbox.mydomain.com

Environment variables also make it easy to set a host for a single command:

Bash or Zsh:

SLINK_HOST=other-devbox.mydomain.com slink go

Fish:

env SLINK_HOST=other-devbox.mydomain.com slink go

In previous versions, Slink used a config file to store the current host. While this made using a single machine as a remote very simple, it made managing multiple machines painful, especially if you were trying to manage them concurrently in multiple shell sessions, or were using Slink in automated wrapper scripts. Environment variables are just about as easy to set up, but make it simpler to manage multiple machines.