I'm working on a website using PhpStorm. For a long time I developed it locally, but then I got hosting and a remote ftp server.
I created a new project in PhpStorm with the settings for remote host, and I found that deploying code takes long time (over a minute) before I can see the result, which is quite uncomfortable when debugging.
Is there any possibility to work with code on a local server, and, when I think that the project is ready for deploy, just send it to the server.
I understand, that I can just work in two different projects and just deploy the "ready" version to server via FTP, but maybe there is some more comfortable way?
There is several answers to this question, and most of them opinion based but i will try and keep it objective.
Case 1
A big corporation gives every developer a sandbox, to test their code from, the corp requires every developer to keep their code on the sandbox. Using mounted drives could be extremely slow. Especially when PhpStorm is indexing.
Case 2
An easy way to keep an auto backup of your code it to use the build in (s)ftp(s) upload/deploy.
Solution
In both cases you could use the auto deploy feature that saves every changes to the server, that way the deploy doesn't take over a minute, but is usually already there before you know it.
I cannot recommend to use the deployment for Production as it will not pass through your version control, SAT, security setups etc. In that case I would suggest something like rocketeer etc.
EDIT:
As for 2 projects, well you can define 2 different deployment servers, and use the default one for your testing, with auto upload or something, and then the other one can be selected from the deployment menu.