Skip to main content

Six Reasons Why Once You Go CLI You Never Go Back!

(ok, fine I know it doesn't rhyme. I'm a coder, not a poet!)

If you're still screwing around uploading and downloading your code to your web server using FTP, it's time you gave the command line a try! Not only is it more efficient to edit your code directly on the server, you'll also find the that the command line tools on your average linux install are quite powerful when it comes to web development!

1. You're on the server - Think how much time you spend dragging/dropping files in FTP, connecting and reconnecting when the FTP connection dies, etc. With a command line you're more saving time already just by avoiding all of that!

2. vi/emacs - These are the two biggies, but there's many, many other text editors available to use on the command line. I'm a vi guy, and it's definitely more powerful than the various GUI-based text editors I've used in the past. The built-in regular expressions alone are great! Sure, there's more than a little bit of a learning curve involved, but c'mon, you're smart aren't you?

3. Your development environment is on the server - Which makes working from anywhere far easier. All I need is an Internet connection and Putty (on windows) to SSH in to the server. My text editor and database interface are right there on the server, and all the settings are tied into my account - so it really doesn't matter what computer I'm using to connect!

4. You have direct access to logs - This is really handy when you're trying to track down a weird bug. You can use your text editor or somethign like tail to investigate your server logs directly - or even watch as the error occurs!

5. It's more secure - Think about it - there's no copies of files sitting on your local machine. There's no need to try to keep your local set of files synched with the server. You're working directly on the server, so you'll notice immediately if it goes down or starts running really slowly. You have who, ps, and all the other command line tools to see if someone else is messing with your server.

6. It's OS-independent - Pondering the big switch from Windows to Mac? Or from Mac to Windows? Or from Amiga to DOS? It doesn't matter - as long as you can run SSH to connect to your server, you're fine. No need to (re)buy software on the new platform, install a bunch of crap, etc. You're ready to roll right away.

So give it a try! And while you're at it, give In the Beginning was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson a read :)

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Using FIle FIlters in FileZilla

Here's a handy tip for situations when you want to download a large number of files - but only of a certain type. For example, perhaps you want to download all the PHP files from a largish website, scattered through many subdirectories. Perhaps you're making a backup and don't want any image files, etc. FileZilla (still the best FTP in my opinion) has a handy feature called filename filters - located under the Edit menu. Here you can set various filters that filter out files based on their filename. Took me a minute to figure that out - you're saying show only PHP files, rather you're saying filter out files that do not have ".php" as their suffix. For some reason, that seems a little backwards to me, but whatever. It works quite well. You can also check whether the filter applies only to files, only to directories - or both. In this example, you'd want to check only files, as otherwise you won't see any directories unless they happen to end in...
1 comment
Read more

Great google article

Over on Maximum PC - there were a few things I didn't know you could do with the various Google apps. One is uploading files to google docs - any file. Which ties in well with my previous post about storing passwords - I uploaded a copy of my password safe file to google docs as a backup. Can't hurt, right? Also, I wasn't aware that you could set up forms in google docs that act as surveys, and then store the results in a google docs spreadsheet. This is a little alarming, as a decent amount of my work involves coding up custom surveys similar to this...
1 comment
Read more

Cleaning content from OpenOffice using Perl

Open office is great software for a number of things - I use it as my office software instead of paying a premium for Microsoft office. But one thing it's not so hot at is converting documents to clean HTML. And one of the main things I use it for is adding content to sites that clients send me in word files or excel spreadsheets. Of course, you can always cut and paste, but that loses a lot of formatting. For example, if the content uses a lot of italics, bold text, etc. it can be a huge pain to go back and put all that back in. Another common situation is a client sending some sort of tablular data in a spreadsheet - for example a list of events. It's the kind of data that can change a lot, and it also needs to be in a table with some decent formatting to be usable. Doing it manually is a lot of grunt work. But grunt work is what computers excel at, and I'm not very good at. So I've developed a number of perl scripts to help streamline this kind of job. I'll go ...
3 comments
Read more