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As a complete DO novice, I would like to learn optimal means for configuring my droplets

Posted September 13, 2017 1.8k views
Configuration ManagementUbuntu 16.04

I am not a big fan of VIM editor, that seems like the only available facility to edit the configuration (app.yml) file directly in my droplet’s console. What is the next best alternative (FTP, SFTP, Remote Desktop)?

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adriatic
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adriatic

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2 answers
Aprexer September 13, 2017

Try installing nano it’s much better than VIM (I hate VIM also probably because I never learnt how to use it)
apt-get install nano
and then use nano whatever.txt

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  • adriatic September 13, 2017

    Thanks @Aprexer - nano is lot better than vi / vim as I was able to paste the text from my machine’s clipboard without a hitch. For more extensive editing though, I would still prefer to get the copy of the configuration file to my desktop and use sublime editor. Do you know of a Digital Ocean preferred method to do that.

    Is there a chance to run a remote desktop instead of a console (Droplet might not be rich enough host to allow that, most likely)

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Aprexer September 13, 2017

You can use sftp, just use the details that you use to ssh into the droplet with.

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  • adriatic September 13, 2017

    I will consider using sftp (not sure which client “brand” as in my experience sftp servers could be moody talking to client they do not like).

    I am not sure whether I got in a new trouble because of nano, or my own fat fingers, as trying to run the just edited .yml file, I got the following error message

    “(<unknown>): did not find expected key while parsing a block mapping at line 40 column 3 -e LANG=en_US.UTF-8
    YAML syntax error. Please check your containers/*.yml config files.”

    which was caused by a non-blank white space being inserted into app.yml file I was editing.

    Sharing this only to point out the silliness of the use of a modern tooling like docker with ancient editors

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