s3-smart-sync

I'm using this myself daily, to sync notes and other files between between desktop and tablet (Using Cryptomator, since one can't trust Amazon. If you do use Cryptomater, you "MUST" switch from WebDAV to WinFsp in the settings!)

As a general rule - don't change/delete files unless the client is idle (green icon or no log output)! (It's fine to e.g. drag and drop a ton of files but you will probably run into a problem particularly if you edit the same file repeatedly within a few seconds.)

Make backups of your data regularly!

If you want the tray icon to look prettier, you have to manually enable the compatibility setting -> high DPI -> scaling behavior performed by: application.

Compatibility

If you can test and confirm any of the ?, please let me know! (Even if it doesn't work. Especially if it doesn't work... 😄)

	"UI" (Tray icon)	CLI
Windows	✅	✅
Linux	?	✅
Mac	?	?

How to use (server)

• Deploy the server using the Dockerfile or of course cloning and doing what's in Dockerfile directly on the server. (Messages sent by the server contain file paths, so I strongly recommend using WSS. If you deploy using CapRover, you can simply enable HTTPS/websockets and it'll take care of the letsencrypt certificate renewal.)
• On AWS, create an SNS topic (this isn't just for performance and cost effectiveness but also for compatibility with anything else that might cause changes in the S3 bucket) and add an HTTP(S) subscription using the URL <your server>/sns. Then configure your S3 bucket to send notifications to that SNS topic.

How to use (client with UI)

• Run the latest release on your client machine(s).

How to use (client with CLI)

From source

1. Clone
2. pnpm install
3. pnpm start:client

Prebuilt (Linux only)

• Run the latest release with the commandline argument cli.

How to build with node-sea

You have to install the signing feature of the Windows SDK and possibly change the path in build-sea.bat.

Dev notes

• I've been going back and forth between node:sea and pkg. Because of that, I am keeping the code for both - for the time being at least. The latest is that with node:sea, one gets brief command prompt popups here and there, while one doesn't with pkg.
• This should probably structured like a monorepo - separate client, server and shared. But since this was just supposed to be a quick project, I won't do that for now. (This is why I've put dependencies needed by the client into devDependencies - they are not necessary for server deployment and will exist when building the client locally anyway.)
• Tray icon DPI nonsense: I tried to attach a manifest to both pkg and node:sea .exes using both mt and rcedit. The pkg exe shrinks by 4 MB and doesn't work any more. With the node:sea exe, rcedit freezes. mt works but would require a environment variable override: "Node.js is only supported on Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, or higher. Setting the NODE_SKIP_PLATFORM_CHECK environment variable to 1 skips this check, ...". Since it's not possible to bake environment variables into the .exe with node:sea, this is obviously not acceptable either. The only thing I can think of to resolve this would be to create a non-node wrapper that runs the .exe. Or maybe bun or deno become a viable alternative at some point (As of October 2024, I don't consider either of them anywhere near production ready. bun can't handle windows paths, at least in with projects like this one. deno still doesn't clean up unneeded npm packages.)
• Multiple strategies are needed to prevent infinite loops:

1. Whenever we do something on S3, it triggers SNS and we would repeat the same thing locally that we just did on S3, which would result in: Syncing to S3 => getting SNS => Syncing to S3 => infinite loop. To avoid this, the last modified date is synced after uploading/downloading and checked before uploading/downloading.
2. Syncing timestamps triggers chokidar. For that, there is ignoreFiles in global state.
3. Allowing frequent operations on the same file (which Cryptomator does), is done using the following: All local operations are debounced. If even with debouncing, the same file keeps changing without regularly changing in size, the client exits at some point because then it's probably a bug.

• tsimp fails without providing an error message, tsx works. 🤷‍♀️

> tsimp .

 ELIFECYCLE  Command failed with exit code 13.

TODO

• Make use of a docker registry so that people can easily run the latest server version.
• Use some CLI library instead of parsing command line arguments manually and not offering help.