CLion 2017.3 Help

Managing Files on Web Servers

Among numerous ways to configure your development and production environments the most frequent ones are as follows:

  • The project root is on your computer and you do your development there. You upload the files to a remote server (folder on a remote computer) and build and execute an application there.
  • The Web server is installed on your computer. The sources are under the server document root (for example, /htdocs), and you do your development right on the server.
  • The Web server is on another computer (remote host). Files on the server are available through the FTP/SFTP/FTPS protocol, through a network share, or a mounted drive.

Now let's see how to use CLion in the above environment configurations. CLion assumes that all development, debugging, and testing is done on your computer and then the code is deployed to a production environment.

Please note the following:

  • The reason to stick to this "local development - deployment" model lies in the way CLion provides its coding assistance which includes code completion, code inspections & validations, code navigation, etc. All this functionality is based on the index of the project files which CLion builds when the project is loaded and updates on the fly as you edit your code.
  • To provide efficient coding assistance, CLion needs to re-index code fast, which requires fast access to project files. The latter can be ensured only for local files, that is, files that are stored on you hard disk and are accessible through the file system. Therefore CLion does not support the mode when you access your files over a network folder (very often it becomes slow and unresponsive, performs random look-ups for no obvious reason, etc).

Interaction between CLion and servers

Interaction between CLion and servers is controlled through server access configurations. Anytime you are going to use a server, you need to define a server access configuration, no matter whether your server is on a remote host or on your computer.

Taking into account all the above, let's define the following basic concepts related to synchronization between CLion and servers.

  • An in-place server is a server whose document root is the parent of the project root, either immediate or not. In other words, the Web server is running on your computer, your project is under its document root, and you do your development directly on the server.
  • A local server is a server that is running in a local or a mounted folder and whose document root is NOT the parent of the project root.
  • A remote server is a server on another computer (remote host).
  • The server configuration root is the highest folder in the file tree on the local or remote server accessible through the server configuration. For in-place servers, it is the project root.
  • A local file/folder is any file or folder under the project root.
  • A remote file/folder is any file or folder on the server, either local or remote.

    Suppose you have a project C:/Projects/My_Project/ with a folder C:/Projects/My_Project/My_Folder and a local server with the document root in C:/xampp/htdocs. You upload the entire project tree to C:/xampp/htdocs/My_Project. In the terms of CLion, the folder C:/Projects/My_Project/My_Folder is referred to as local and the folder C:/xampp/htdocs/My_Project/My_Folder is referred to as remote.

  • Upload is copying data from the project TO the server, either local or remote.
  • Download is copying data FROM the server to the project.

After you have configured synchronization with a server, you can upload, download, and manage files on it directly from CLion. Moreover, you can suppress uploading or downloading specific files or entire folders. Finally, you can optimize you workflow by configuring content roots so specific folders are not involved in indexing, which significantly saves project indexing time.

Synchronization with servers, uploading, downloading, and managing files on them are provided via the Remote Hosts Access bundled plugin, which is by default enabled. If the plugin is disabled, activate it in the Plugins page of the Settings dialog box. For details, see Enabling and Disabling Plugins.

Last modified: 27 March 2018

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