EteSync - Secure Data Sync

A skeleton app for running your own Etebase server

Installation

From source

Before installing the EteSync server make sure you install virtualenv (for Python 3):

• Arch Linux: pacman -S python-virtualenv
• Debian/Ubuntu: apt-get install python3-virtualenv
• Mac/Windows/Other Linux: install virtualenv or just skip the instructions mentioning virtualenv.

Then just clone the git repo and set up this app:

git clone https://github.com/etesync/server-skeleton.git

cd server-skeleton

# Set up the environment and deps
virtualenv -p python3 venv  # If doesn't work, try: virtualenv3 venv
source venv/bin/activate

pip install -r requirements.txt

Configuration

If you are familiar with Django you can just edit the settings file according to the Django deployment checklist if you are not, we will soon provide a simple configuration file for easy deployment like we had with EteSync.

Some particular settings that should be edited are:

• ALLOWED_HOSTS -- this is the list of host/domain names or addresses on which the app will be served
• DEBUG -- handy for debugging, set to False for production
• SECRET_KEY -- an ephemeral secret used for various cryptographic signing and token generation purposes. See below for how default configuration of SECRET_KEY works for this project.

Now you can initialise our django app

./manage.py migrate

And you are done! You can now run the debug server just to see everything works as expected by running:

./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

Using the debug server in production is not recommended, so please read the following section for a proper deployment.

Production deployment

EteSync is based on Django so you should refer to one of the following

• The instructions of the Django project here.
• Instructions from uwsgi here.

There are more details about a proper production setup using uWSGI and Nginx in the wiki.

The webserver should also be configured to serve Etebase using TLS. A guide for doing so can be found in the wiki as well.

Usage

Create yourself an admin user:

./manage.py createsuperuser

At this stage you can either just use the admin user, or better yet, go to: www.your-etesync-install.com/admin and create a non-privileged user that you can use.

That's it!

Now all that's left is to open the EteSync app, add an account, and set your custom server address under the "advance" section.

SECRET_KEY and secret.txt

The default configuration creates a file “secret.txt” in the project’s base directory, which is used as the value of the Django SECRET_KEY setting. You can revoke this key by deleting the secret.txt file and the next time the app is run, a new one will be generated. Make sure you keep the secret.txt file secret (don’t accidentally commit it to version control, exclude it from your backups, etc.). If you want to change to a more secure system for storing secrets, edit etesync_server/settings.py and implement your own method for setting SECRET_KEY (remove the line where it uses the get_secret_from_file function). Read the Django docs for more information about the SECRET_KEY and its uses.

Updating

First, run git pull --rebase to update this repository. Then, inside the virtualenv:

1. Run pip install -U -r requirements.txt to update the dependencies.
2. Run python manage.py migrate to perform database migrations.

You can now restart the server.

Supporting Etebase

Please consider registering an account even if you self-host in order to support the development of Etebase, or help by spreading the word.