Is there an IDE that fully supports “remote development” and “remote host execution” on Raspberry Pi?

Question

I've been developing Python code for my RPi from my Mac. It's simple: I've installed XQuartz on the Mac, idle3 on the RPi, ssh -Y ... to the RPi from the XQuartz terminal, then idle3 & to access idle3 on my Mac's desktop as it runs on the RPi.

This works reasonably well, but I've developed a case of "feature lust" for some of the "professional" IDEs, so I read some reviews, and chose two commercial IDEs as most likely to succeed because they made strong claims for supporting "remote development" and "remote host execution". I began my evaluation about 10 days ago.

To my way of thinking, neither of these commercial IDEs actually do what they say wrt remote development and remote host execution. I'll illustrate what I mean with this very simple code snip:

import os
keyval = os.environ.get('MY_ENV_VAR')

My existing setup (XQuartz & RPi-hosted idle3) handles this fine. Both of the other commercial IDEs fail to return a value for keyval, nor do they raise an exception/error. Maybe it's just me, but this doesn't seem like good support for remote development and remote host execution. I've been in touch with both vendors' tech support, and it seems they can't really execute this code on the RPi, but instead offer "work-arounds".

So finally, here's my question: Does anyone know of a "full-featured" IDE that supports Python (other languages would be nice, too) that really and truly support remote development and remote host execution?

Answer 1

You can use Jetbrains softwares. They have all kinds of IDEs. For python, there's Pycharm IDE. There's a paid or free version but with the free version you don't have the remote development feature.

Answer 2

I don’t speak from experience but I have met developers who use Vim for commercial grade software products.

I understand you would combine SSH with Vim to achieve your remote development and build capability.

This approach requires a lot of configuration. Check out this Wiki for some productivity ideas:
http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/Use_Vim_like_an_IDE

Answer 3

With Xojo you can use the Remote Debugger to run code directly on the Pi.

Answer 4

Your code snippet is not as simple as you may think.

Environment variables are set separately for each process (possibly with inheritance), so if you set MY_ENV_VAR in a shell and test for it from the same shell (with Python code or otherwise) it will be set. If you run Python from a different shell, it won't be. Even in the same shell, you may lose environment variables if you spawn a process in a way that won't inherit them. For instance, sudo -u pi python ./myscript.py will not inherit MY_ENV_VAR, yet it's a perfectly sane approach for a remote IDE to spawn a process with a specific user ID.

The above assumes that you have access to the shell that your IDE is using as a remote session, and set the variable there. This may not be the case. IDEs can start their own login shell, their own subshell, or start processes with no shell at all, and in case of login shells they may log in as a user you don't expect. If you set MY_ENV_VAR in your .bash_profile, it will be set if you login as pi but it will not be set if you start a non-interactive shell as in ssh pi@raspberry.local python ./myscript or a subshell as in sudo -u pi bash. Needless to say, MY_ENV_VAR will not be set if the IDE uses a different user for remote execution, which may not even use bash as a login shell.

In essence, whatever an IDE does to execute a process remotely, you can always find a case where it doesn't have the same environment as a local process. You have to find out how to set variables in a way that is compatible with an IDE of your choice, and stick to that approach.