Machines and workspaces

A machine is a server, with its own address and login. A workspace is one person’s account on a machine — usually the thing you actually work in day to day.

devmachine workspaces new alice --machine main
devmachine sync

Your computer

Your computer is the one you run devmachine on — usually your laptop. The VPS is never “your computer” in this manual. You can also list your computer itself as a machine, with self: true, so the CLI can manage things on it directly, with no address or SSH involved:

machines:
  - name: mac
    self: true

This is different from machines create-local, which makes a small virtual machine that lives on your computer but is reached like a normal remote server, with its own address and key. See Your computer as a machine for when to use which.

A workspace can’t run on a self machine — a workspace is an account reached over SSH, and a self machine has neither an account nor SSH.

Several machines, several workspaces

Each workspace names the machine it runs on:

machines:
  - name: main
    hosts: [203.0.113.10]
  - name: sandbox
    hosts: [198.51.100.7]
    port: 2222
    key: /keys/sandbox

workspaces:
  - name: alice
    machine: main
  - name: bob
    machine: sandbox

devmachine ssh alice     # lands on main
devmachine ssh bob       # lands on the sandbox

Moving bob to another machine is one line of configuration; the command you type never changes. machine: can be left out only when you have one machine — with several, it’s required.

The Linux account

A workspace’s account uses its own name by default: alice owns the user alice. Give it a different name with user:, for when that name is already taken:

workspaces:
  - name: bob
    machine: sandbox
    user: bob-dev

Making and removing a workspace

devmachine workspaces new alice
devmachine workspaces new bob --like alice
devmachine sync

new only writes a line in config.yml — sync is what actually creates the account. A new workspace gets the packages listed in defaults.workspace, unless you pass --packages or --like <name> to copy another workspace’s list.

devmachine workspaces rm alice

removes the entry from config.yml. The account, its files, and its home folder stay on the machine — remove those yourself if you want them gone.

Reaching a workspace by name

devmachine aliases --write
mosh alice-devmachine

writes an SSH shortcut for every workspace into ~/.ssh/config, inside a marked block it can safely rewrite without touching anything else there:

# >>> devmachine — generated, do not edit
Host alice-devmachine
    HostName 100.64.0.5
    User alice
    HostKeyAlias main-devmachine
# <<< devmachine

HostKeyAlias keeps SSH from complaining when the same machine is reached at two different addresses — it tells SSH the two addresses are the same known machine. A -pub shortcut appears only when there’s a second, fallback address to use.