• If you can ssh into the server then Unison should work.
• Install the same version on the client and on the server.

To sync the contents of dir b into dir a:

unison -batch -color true <dir-a> ssh://<user>@a<host>/<dir-b>

Setup

1. Download the binary file with wget
2. chmod +x <file>
3. copy the executable somewhere on your path like /usr/local/bin
4. unison -doc tutorial > remote method > remote shell method
5. use a filewatcher to sync on change, or use cron to sync every n minutes

You can also use unison to sync files on the same computer.

References

gist

Background

Recently I needed to work on a codebase that was on a remote machine whilst still using my local workflow and developer tools.

Vim's built in scp:// functionality isn't versatile enough - i wanted to use fzf.vim to search for text across the code base. This led me to rsync, sshfs, and eventually unison.