A friend of mine at work recently introduced me to Nitrous.IO and I must say it’s a pretty awesome online dev tool. Its still in beta at the moment and new features are continually being added. Accounts are currently free and come with a small amount of “NO2”, which are points you can spend on configuring the hardware available to the boxes you generate. You can earn more NO2 by spamming your friends and getting them to sign up with your referral code (see my previous link) :-).

Within your account you can create a box from a number of pre-configured templates and spend some (or probably all) of your available NO2 adding disk space and memory to it. When you start your box you are then able to access an IDE and terminal through your browser. Whilst the online IDE isn’t perfect (currently global search isn’t available, either by filename or for a string within a file) and probably isn’t suitable for full-time dev work, it is a neat solution to those quick fixes you might need to do when away from your machine.

You can spin up things like MySQL, Redis, Postgres and Memcached if your applications need them to run. If you’re doing any automated browser testing in your test suite you can use PhantomJS to run them.

Another nice addition is the collaborative functionality of the online IDE provided by NitrousIO. If you’re pair-programming on something, you can both log into the same box and edit the same files at the same time. If you ever used Google Wave you’ll have an idea of what this is like. You each have your own colour-coded cursor and can make changes to the file at the same time and see each other’s changes as they happen. There’s a chat-box that shows you what files you and any other developers are opening/editing/closing, which you could also use to chat … but you’d really be better off with Skype or something.

It really is a very cool tool when you’re away from your own machine. I guess you just have to decide how far you’re willing to trust a 3rd party with your source code…