Flashing to an ESP32 from Cloud 9 based development

[kolban]

I'm studying the Cloud 9 development environment and, so far, I'm very much liking what I see (I haven't tried any of the alternatives ... but this one seems to be working great). My plan is to write it up once Ive got a good recipe.

At a high level, I can build ESP32 applications in my browser with the compute and storage being hosted by Cloud 9. The result is our standard build outputs.

The puzzle I am facing are the options for moving my compiled code into ESP32 flash. The binaries live in the cloud and I can, of course, copy them to my local PC for flashing. However, can we do better? What options might exist to flash to an ESP32 directly from a browser or through some other tool?

I'm using Chrome and Chrome OS has Serial port access. Is there a design guide for writing a custom "esptool"?

Anyone thought through this style of working previously?

[MalteJ]

We have our code on Gitlab.com and use Gitlab CI for building artifacts. I have installed a Gitlab CI runner on a virtual machine that will do the compiling. The artifacts are uploaded to an S3-compatible BLOB-Store.
Using the OTA functionality the esp32 downloads the firmware images to its second partition and restarts when it is done and boots the new firmware.
Works quite nice!

Malte