Shared Server Development with PhpStorm

Working on a remote server—with or without multiple developers—is just asking for problems, but sometimes there’s no way around this. I’ve used several IDEs for this task and found that PhpStorm has several unique features that ease the pain considerably:

  • It fingerprints remote content on download and re-verifies the remote content before auto-uploading. If someone else has edited that file, you get an option to merge/download/cancel. If the merge has conflicts you get a nice diff view to make manual decisions.
  • It can check the server whenever you open a file. That way you can known right away remote changes have occurred before working.
  • It keeps a history of all file changes and lets you revert to any or merge content from any of them into the current version. Even if you git commit frequently, this is a huge help sometimes. A coworker had accidentally overwritten one of the files I had recently changed and added his own code. When I realized this I just popped open Local History and merged my changes into the current file with a single click.
  • It can generate a diff with remote over a file/directory tree. You then can decide per file whether to upload/download/delete/leave as is.
  • It can auto-deploy changes made outside the IDE. I can set it so while PhpStorm is open, anything done to my local cache files (e.g. git checkout/some other operation) is deployed to remote.

PhpStorm basically nails remote development like it does most other areas.

Why not work on via remote file system (e.g. samba/sshfs)? With basic text editors you can kinda get away with this, but a true IDE needs to watch a lot of files, and if they’re remote…

Why not use an IDE on the remote server? I don’t know of any text-based IDE. Extremely good code editors, sure, but that difference matters.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.