coryd.dev-eleventy/src/posts/2024/mobile-web-development-with-codespaces.md

date	title	description	tags
2024-01-26	Mobile web development with Codespaces	Wherein the author describes making code changes on a mobile device (iOS) and pushing them live.	development iOS

I was on vacation recently and, because I'm exactly that nerd, I ended up wanting to add an npm package and postbuild step to this site.¹

To do this, what I did was:

1. Spin up a GitHub Codespace for this project.
2. Add the Codespace to Secure Shellfish²
3. Access the Codespace in Secure Shellfish and run the appropriate npm install command.
4. Add the secrets my site requires to run per GitHub's instructions.
5. Run npm start and verify the build in the Codespace URL produced for the application running on localhost:<PORT NUMBER>³
6. Push up the changes from the Codespace.

An alternative approach would be to make edits to the code locally on iOS using Secure Shellfish's Files.app integration — this would expose the application files as a folder inside of the Secure Shellfish provider in Files.app. You could make the edits using Runestone which also integrates nicely with Files.app.

This isn't approach I'd use for long, focused dev sessions (or critical applications/changes) but it'll do for quick, low-stakes changes on mobile.

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1. To send outbound webmentions. See Remy's docs. ↩︎

2. Which is an awesome ssh client — and a terminal on macOS (I only use it on iOS though). ↩︎

3. Eleventy, naturally. ↩︎