Eclipse has an amazing set of tools in the form of plug-ins which we can go on adding to the Eclipse platform and use effectively in our development work. Most importantly Eclipse provides an open source platform for creating an extensible integrated development environment. Anyone may develop tools that integrate seamlessly with IDE and other tools. Today I’m talking about my experience with such a wonderful tool, Remote System Explorer (RSE).

What is Remote System Explorer (RSE)

Remote System Explorer (RSE) is a perspective toolkit in Eclipse Workbench, that allows you to connect and work with a variety of remote systems. With the predefined plug-ins, you can look at remote file systems, transfer files between hosts, do remote search, execute commands and work with processes.RSE allows you to connect and work with a variety of remote systems including;

1. Remote file systems through SSH, FTP or dstore agents (seamless editing of remote files including remote search and compare)

2. Remote shell access (compiling with error navigation)

3. Remote process handling through dstore agents

4. Remote debugging through CDT / gdb / gdbserver.

Read more about RSE here.

Get Started with RSE

RSE plugin is very simple to install and work with. Here is a small tip about its installation.

1. Start eclipse

2. Select Install New Software under Help menu and now you can check eclipse have this plugin alreday installed by checking What is alreday installed link at bottom. If its not there are multiple ways to install RSE addon with Eclipse.

Option 1.

Select RSE by listing ‘Available Software Sites’ or directly add download link by clicking Add button in right side. It will give you a window like this

Type anything in Name field for local reference and give plugin download location in the corresponding field

Eg: http://download.eclipse.org/tm/updates/3.2/ [version may change Search for current version here ]

Option 2.

Download current stable version of RSE from here and extract it. Then drop in your eclipse dropins directory and then restart your Eclipse platform.

Now RSE is ready to use.

Connect Remote Machine Using RSE

Start your eclipse and follow the following instructions,

• Select Show View under Window menu

• Select Other

• Select Remote Systems

• Press OK. It will create a Remote Systems tab and right click anywhere on the Remote Systems tab.

• Select New Connection

• Select SSH Only

• Click on next button and enter IP Address of remote machine

• Click onFinish.

It will create a new remote instance and expand it. SelectSftpfile and try to access file and it will ask for authentication. Enter your login credentials.

Note: May if your credentials are correct it will return an error as follows

Remember that we have selectedSSH Onlyconnection, so that our remote machine need to installedOpen SSHthen port 22 will available for us.

After required port will open RSE confirms our decision and now you can manipulate remote file from your machine.

Have fun. Cheers 🙂