Web development on an iPad Pro

Today’s question: Does the iPad Pro fit your web development needs?

4 min readFeb 8, 2018

Welcome to my series about the iPad Pro and whether it is capable of being a laptop replacement. Spoiler: For the average user, it is. For professionals who need to get work done, it’s complicated. The hardware is brilliant, but it’s sometimes held back by the lack of software and iOS restrictions. Today’s question: Does the iPad Pro fit your web development needs?

Forget about local development

First off, let me give you an idea of my Mac/PC development environment with an example of how I usually start a new project; let’s say a web app that uses WordPress as its foundation. I start by setting up a new VM on my laptop with Vagrant that mimics the production server (PuPHPet is a great tool that helps you handle this). The next step is to git init the document root, so everything is version controlled. Grunt and Bower will reside in the …/wp-content/themes/newTheme/ folder to handle CSS preprocessing, js minifying and all that stuff. Last but not least, I’ll hook the project up to something like beanstalk so that it lives in the cloud and can be deployed easily.

This is what I consider to be a functional local development environment – and it’s quite obvious already that an iPad Pro just can’t provide anything that even closely resembles such a setup. Does this disqualify the iPad Pro as a machine to develop on right away? No, not quite. However, it definitely means that it can’t replace your PC/Mac if you’re used to local development. Depending on your needs it may work well as a companion device that helps you stay productive on the go – or as a platform to develop smaller projects on. But there are many limitations, the most obvious one being the inability to install a virtual machine or any sort of local server on which you have access to SQL databases and run stuff like node.js.

However… you can, sort of, kind of, do all of these things on an iPad Pro. But only if your development environment lives in the cloud.

Living the cloud life: VPS and SSH

Alright, so you really, really want to use your iPad Pro as your main mobile development device. Then you need to move your development environment into the cloud and access it via SSH. This is possible and viable – and I’ve heard from some developers who really enjoy traveling and working with their 10" iPad Pro with a Smart Keyboard – but I guess not many would actually want to go through all the hassle to get this scenario up and running, unless they already work this way. I mean: Why spend all this time setting up a development environment on a VPS that is most likely already at your disposal on your laptop. What? You don’t have a laptop, only a desktop PC?! Well, yeah, then this solution might be for you and apps like the excellent Coda for iOS from Panic will offer a pretty decent experience.

I have yet to try such a setup, because it wouldn’t make my life a whole lot easier. Well yes, if I wanted to develop on the go, I could use my iPad Pro – but I don’t mind bringing along my laptop for this kind of work. Now, in case you’re still curious what going down this route looks like, check out Web Development on an iPad by Peter Jang.

An interesting side note in this context is that I’m very impressed by Apple’s Smart Keyboard. I find it pleasant to type on and its form factor and low weight mean that I basically never remove it from my iPad. I also wouldn’t mind writing code on it. However, if you’re not a fan of it, don’t worry: Just connect your favourite bluetooth keyboard.

It’s not quite there yet

To sum things up: The iPad Pro alone most likely won’t satisfy a majority of web developers. If your projects are super lightweight, it might work out; if you’re already using a remote server as your development environment, it might also work out. For the rest of us, depending on the development environment and server setup, it is – at best – a nifty companion device.