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Local vs. Remote

Local

Some JMU CS Students do a significant amount of their software development for their courses on stu. While you can do CS 343 development on stu, you can’t run your code there. In general we assume you’re developing and running locally. That being said, it would be good for you to have your developer tools setup to be able to do things for you remotely (like interact with github for example).

Remote (authentication via key-pairs)

Web Development is much more interesting when you and others can reach your web sites and web apps even when your laptop isn’t available to serve them. To facilitate your ability to deploy your code to JMU CS’s student web server (“w3stu”) and to GitHub Pages, you should configure authentication via key-pairs, which will:

  1. offer skip logic in the instructions if you have previously completed CS 261 setup steps
  2. guide you through creating an SSH key
  3. instruct you on how to tell your tools (esp. ssh) that it should know about this key and when to use it
  4. instruct you on how to make stu know this key is legit
  5. instruct you on how to tell github this key is legit

With this configuration complete, many other tools we use will benefit from them automatically, and many others you can tell to take advantage of this method of authentication.

Accessing Remote Files via GUI

  1. Install Cyberduck

Confirm/Install rsync

Open a terminal (if you are running Windows, we mean specifically open git bash). Run which rsync to check if rsync is found. (On Windows, rsync is likely not installed.)

Windows

Follow these steps to get rsync working in Git Bash (without having to install and configure a bunch of other tools):

  1. Download and open the latest rsync package from MSYS2.
  2. Copy the usr folder (from rsync...tar.zst) into C:\Program Files\Git.
    • This should merge the files into the existing C:\Program Files\Git\usr folder.
  3. Download the latest libxxhash package from MSYS2.
  4. Copy the usr folder (from libxxhash...tar.zst) into C:\Program Files\Git.
    • This should merge the files into the existing C:\Program Files\Git\usr folder.
  5. You should now be able to type rsync in Git Bash and see the usage message.

Not Windows

  1. use your usual package manager to install rsync