A while back I used the Arduino IDE for programming the esp8266.  I've lately been playing around with running MicroPython on an ESP8266.  The nice thing about using the MicroPython firmware is that one can do things such as upload and execute code on an ESP8266 remotely.  It's still a bit clunky in some ways (such as issues uploading updated version of a particular file) but it often beats having to pull an ESP8266 out of a project and plug it into a computer every time to update a program.

Anyways I've uploaded the file, just edit the file with the ip address of your webserver that you have everything setup on and it will run when you reboot the ESP8266 that's been flashed with MicroPython firmware.