Working with remote machine - Adam Sobaniec

With your VPS connected and secured, you can start using it as your main development environment. Believe it or not - with a bit of SSH plumbing it's possible to run a full project (say, a Vite frontend with a Node.js backend orchestrated by Nomad or Kubernetes) entirely on a remote server and work on it as if everything ran locally. Two things make this possible: port forwarding and a simple way to transfer files. Let's go through both.

Port forwarding

Accessing remote services

Whenever you run your backend on, let's say, http://localhost:8000 on the remote machine and try to reach it from your laptop, it won't be available (and it shouldn't!). To access it you need to set up port forwarding the moment you connect. Use the -L parameter. For example, extending the alias defined in the previous article:

ssh -L 8000:localhost:8000 -o TCPKeepAlive=yes -o ServerAliveCountMax=20 -o ServerAliveInterval=15 -q -p {ssh_port} -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa {user}@{IP or DNS}

As a result, you can access your service as if it were running directly on your machine!

Note: There is no need to update firewall rules. A single port (the SSH port) is used and acts as a connection tunnel.

The main drawback is that you need to know the ports in advance. On larger projects this gets tricky. I just update my alias each time I hit a new port, then open a second ssh connection with the extra -L flag - the new tunnel is added without disturbing the first session.

Adding ports to a live connection

Sometimes a port pops up only briefly and you don't want to reconnect - for instance during MCP authentication in tools like Claude Code. SSH has ways to extend a live connection without dropping it. Since I rarely hit this case I just open a second session with an extra -L flag, but if you run into it often it's worth digging into the options.

Exposing local services to remote

There may be a situation where you have to expose some service on your machine to the remote machine. For example, you may want to expose your Chrome with remote debug so that Claude Code can connect to it via Chrome MCP. In this case you need to define the -R parameter:

ssh -R 9222:localhost:9222 -o TCPKeepAlive=yes -o ServerAliveCountMax=20 -o ServerAliveInterval=15 -q -p {ssh_port} -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa {user}@{IP or DNS}

With such a connection, whenever you run Claude Code on the remote machine it can reach your local Chrome as if it were running on the server.

Transferring files

Port forwarding solves running services remotely, but you still need a way to move files between your laptop and the server. Downloading an asset locally and then getting it into the repo on the remote machine is the classic case. There are plenty of options here (scp, rsync, mounted drives...) but I wanted something very simple: navigate to a directory on the remote, run a single command, and have a file server scoped to that directory. I couldn't find anything quite like it, so I vibe coded my own: remote-file-manager.

Uploading files

On the remote machine, navigate to the target directory and start rfm:

cd ~/code/my-project/assets
rfm

Then, on your laptop, open localhost:8000/file-explorer:

Remote File Manager

Built-in file explorer is very handy for transferring files between machines

You can also edit text files directly in the browser, which is handy when copy-pasting content between machines. There's a small quality-of-life touch on top: pasting a screenshot from the clipboard uploads it as an image.

Serving HTML

rfm doubles as an HTTP server. If an index.html exists in the directory where you started it, navigating to localhost:8000 will serve it - useful when you want to preview a static page without spinning up a separate server.

Adam Sobaniec