Examining VisIt test results on a remote system

[markcmiller86]

Have you ever run VisIt's test suite, or some portion thereof, on a remote system and then wanted to browse the html files produced to see how the test went? You can easily do this using a combination of python and ssh port forwarding.

1. Go to the directory on the remote system where the resulting index.html is produced after running the test. It is typically in ...build/test/output/html.
2. Start a simple python http server there with the command python3 -m http.server 8050 (where 8050 is your choice for port number)
3. In a terminal on your local machine, use ssh to create a port-forward from your local machine to the remote machine's 8050 port with the command ssh -f -N -L 8000:localhost:8050 username@remote-host. You will have to complete the login prompts for the remote machine but once done, the forward is created.
4. Open your browser and point it to http://localhost:8000. You should then see the html files on the remote system in your browser. All the http traffic is flowing over the ssh connection.

This is easier than tar'ing up and copying the files especially when you are running and re-running the test suite and is faster than launching a browser on the remote system and displaying back via X windows (but maybe not via VNC).