Securely sharing a Pi repository dir to other systems

Question

This question may come off as ambiguous and/or repeatable, but I can't find the answer I'm looking for.

I use intelliJ IDEA with the Camelcade Perl5 plugin to do development work for the RPi on my laptop. (I either wrap or write C code that contains a Perl API interface). The Pi isn't well suited to run such an IDE efficiently.

My problem statement:

I want to be able to load up a directory in my chosen IDE from the Pi on my laptop, so I can write code from the comfort of my laptop to that repository, and have it like I may as well be doing the writing on the Pi itself without having to have the UI started on my Pi.

My question:

What is the preferred way to do this. Specifically, I want to know the most secure/efficient way to set something like this up, in point-form (I think this puts the question within the guidelines; advise if not).

My issue(s):

There are multiple explanations across the web on how to share stuff, whether it be Unix or the Pi itself. However, I've been out of the sysadmin world for a few years, and I just know that blanketing things with chmod -R 777... is unacceptable here. I need a proper way to do this with reasonable *nix permissions, while still allowing RW for authorized *nix users, without global write access or other nonsense that create huge gaps in file system security.

I'm looking at sshfs and smb, but again, most things I find online are tutorials that advise to blanket allow permissions with 0777 or 1777 perms and that's not acceptable.

Is there a de-facto standard that Pi users use for situations like this that are secure file-system wise, with the ability to maintain user-level access?

Answer 1

Ok, so I was way overthinking this, and in fact it's exceptionally simple.

On my dev laptop:

sudo apt-get install sshfs

mkdir ~/repos/pi

sshfs [email protected]:/home/pi/repos ~/repos/pi

Now in my IDE, I can simply open the repository as if it were local (~/repos/pi/project_x). Much, much simpler and easier than setting up an entire Samba setup for my needs and purposes, and I maintain the file system security per user, as I needed.