Constantly jumping between my home desktop and work laptop, working on the same projects require frequent git push/pull. For every small edit, I have to git everything to keep my workspaces up to date.

Another tedious task was to developp directly on my RPI. Coding on nano throught a SSH connection is not something I would call a comfy dev environnement. 💆‍♀️

Basically, what I need is just a NAS... wright?

Yeah! This could do the trick 👍 I could even use it to share movies across my phone and PC 🙌 and to host a database (a MongoDB to be more precise). Terrific!

“Why don't you just buy a Synology NAS? You can even put database on this bad boy!”

Ooohhh, come on! Where can I have fun if I buy an all in one box 😋 I mean, a Synlogy NAS despite all its features will always stay less flexible than a RPI. I still need it to run all my sketchy websites and other quirky node projects 🧪.

Just keep in head that I'm a Windows user so my options are kinda limited...

Let's dance

A first google search lead me to Samba. It's free, both Windows and Unix compatible and do not seems overly complicated to configure.

LETS GOOOO 🏃‍♀️

apt install samba
cp /etc/samba/smb.conf /etc/samba/smb.conf.sample
service smbd start

Well, that was easy! Install, duplicate default config file (a good habit everyone should have 🙆‍♀️) and run the thingy.

Quick technical aside

Unix and Window file system and permissions DO NOT work the same. Samba take care 'natively' of the file system aspect but it needs some extra tweaking for permissions.

Power user know how Windows permissions can be a real nightmare sometimes 💥

The holy config file

After speding a lot of time messing if different config sample found on blog,forum,... I finally come up with a working one 🌟

[share]
   comment=Workplace
   path=/home/pi/work/
   browseable=Yes
   writeable=Yes
   only guest=no
   create mask=0777
   directory mask=0777
   public=no

As we set public=no, we need to create a samba user to be able to log in 🔒

sudo smbpasswd -a pi

This command will create a user named pi and allow you to set a password for it.

Windows side

What's great about Samba is that it's natively supported by Windows. Open the Windows explorer and just write down the server IP address like following \\192.168.1.101. A small window should appear asking you login informations.

This only works for local network. In order to connect from everywhere you need to tweak your router config to forward port 445 to your server.

To connect from any Android phone you can use CS File Explorer 😉

And we're done! 🎉