How to split PhpStorm host and guest for development, without Vagrant

Question

I have been using Vagrant with an OS X host and a Ubuntu guest. It works fine except for permissions problems on the synched directories. So, my question is, is there an alternative solution that doesn't use synched directories?

I would like to continue using PhpStorm on OS X, and continue using Ubuntu server as my development environment. Is there a way I can connect to the Ubuntu guest and work effectively without the Vagrant share?

EDIT:

I am using VirtualBox as the VM provider. The errors are something to the effect of:

• Cannot fetch REST services
• Cannot fetch API authentication details
• Cannot fetch RPC services

Answer 1

One possible solution might be to use vagrant's rsync capabilities to get your data to the guest. Note that this is a one-way operation, meaning that it's not as simple to get the data back out from the guest system. I also found that rsync-auto gets hickups too often to be useful.

I personally use rsync if file permissions need to be fine grained and resolv to the ususal :owner and :group parameters if coarse permissions are enough. At times, I need to combine rsync with some provisioning scripts to set the correct permissions.

An alternative might be to purely rely on the guests network capabilities to get that data there, meaning that it could periodically get it from some remote location (e.g. pull -f from a github repo). A pull hook could be created to set the permissions each time the repo is updated.