Set Up Sparkleshare With Your Own Server

Last week we saw how to install Sparkleshare in Ubuntu from a PPA. As a reminder:

Sparkleshare is a tool to synchronize your files in the cloud - like Dropbox or SpiderOak - but unlike these, Sparkleshare is open source and allows you to use your own server. Sparkleshare uses GIT so if you delete/modify some files by accident, you can easily revert the changes.

If you want to use Sparkleshare to syncronize files with your server, the set up is a bit more complicated so I though I'd make a separate post for this. Using the steps below, you should be able to use Sparkleshare with your own server (make sure you've firstly installed Sparkleshare on your computer!).

How to set up Sparkleshare with your own server

1. Stop sparkleshare on your computer. To get Sparkleshare to sync with your server, you'll need to create a paswordless SSH key which you'll use to login to your server.

Firstly install openssh-client on your computer (obviously you must have Sparkleshare installed already):

sudo apt-get install openssh-client

Now generate a key pair if you don't have one already:

ssh-keygen -t rsa

Do not enter a password for the key (just press the ENTER key).

2. Copy the key to the server:

ssh-copy-id USER@SERVER

3. Connect to the server and install GIT (if it's not already installed):

ssh USER@SERVER
sudo apt-get install git-core

4. Now let's set up the Sparkleshare GIT folder on your server:

git init --bare sparkleshare.git

5. Back on your computer, go into the Sparkleshare folder and clone the remote Sparkleshare GIT repo:

cd ~/SparkleShare/
git clone USER@SERVER:sparkleshare.git

6. You can now start SparkleShare from the menu - copying new files in your ~/Sparkleshare/sparkleshare folder should now sync them with your server (without requesting for a password). To set up Sparkleshare sync on multiple computers, simply follow steps 1, 2 and 5 on each computer.

Install Sparkleshare In Ubuntu Via PPA (Open Source Cloud Sync - Dropbox Alternative)

Sparkleshare is a tool to synchronize your files in the cloud - like Dropbox or SpiderOak - but unlike these, Sparkleshare is open source and allows you to use your own server. Sparkleshare uses GIT so if you delete/modify some files by accident, you can easily revert the changes. You can use it with your own server, GitHub or Gitorious. In this post I'll only cover setting up Sparkleshare with GitHub.

Sparkleshare is still in development and until now you had to compile it yourself but I've recently came across a PPA that provides Sparkleshare (Client) GIT snapshots so you can easily install it in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.

Install Sparkleshare (Client) in Ubuntu via PPA

To add the PPA and install Sparkleshare in Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat, use the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nuovodna/nuovodna-stuff
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sparkleshare

Warning: this PPA also provides some other packages so use it at your own risk! It is better to add the PPA if you plan on using Sparkleshare so you'll receive updates but if you just want to try it out, you can download the .deb below:

• 32bit
• 64bit

Setting up Sparkleshare with GitHub

Setting up Sparkleshare with your own server is a bit complicated so in this post I'll only cover synchronizing your files with GitHub. For using Sparkleshare with your own server, see: Set Up Sparkleshare With Your Own Server.

GitHub is a web-based hosting service for projects that use the Git revision control system but with Sparkleshare, we'll use it as our own cloud server to which the files will be synchronized. You can use Sparkleshare (w/ GitHub) to back up files in the cloud, easily share files with others, synchronize your local code with GitHub and so on. All this also applies to Gitorious too, but in this post I'll only cover setting up Sparkleshare with GitHub.

1. Get a GitHub account (it's free!).

2. Create a repository @ GitHub: click "Dashboard", then click "New Repository". Your repository name will later be referred to as your folder in Sparkleshare.

3. Start Sparkleshare, enter your name and email and click next. Then stop (do not go to the next step)! Now open Nautilus and go to /home/YOUR_USERNAME/.config/sparkleshare

Here, you'll find a file called "sparkleshare.YOUR_EMAIL.key.pub". Open this file in a text editor and copy its contents.

4. On the GitHub site go to Account Settings > SSH Public keys, click on "Add another public key":

Here, give your key a title (like SparkleShare-home or whatever you want) and in the "key" field, paste the .pub file contents (which you've copied under step 3).

5. Now return to the Sparkleshare window:

Select "GitHub" and under "Folder name" enter: "your_github_username/repository" (without the quotes), where "your_github_username" is your GitHub username and "repository" is the name of the GitHub repository you've created under step 2.

Now you should have a notification area icon for Sparkleshare and a folder called "Sparkleshare/your_repository_name" in your home directory. Copy files to this folder and they will get synchronized with GitHub.

Important: do not place any private files into the Sparkleshare folder as these files can be seen by anyone if you have a free account. For a paid account, you can get more space, private repositories, private collaborators, etc.

For help setting up Sparkleshare with Gitorious, see the Sparkleshare documentation.

Update: for using Sparkleshare with your own server, see: Set Up Sparkleshare With Your Own Server

Meet SparkleShare, An Open Source Dropbox Alternative [Ubuntu Installation Instructions]

SparkleShare is a syncing tool similar to Dropbox but which allows you to use your own server (or some already existing servers). It uses GIT so if you delete/modify some files by accident, you can easily revert the changes.

The good

SparkleShare has quite a few interesting features / reasons to use it. Obviously the most important one is that you can use it with your own server. Also, it will be available for Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.

If you don't want to set up your own server, SparkleShare can be used with Github and Gitorious. These are project hosting solutions that provide free space if you work on Free and Open Source Software projects. Note that using these 2 services, all your synced files will be public!

The bad

- It uses Mono. That's an enough reason for a lot of people not to use it.

- Currently, hosting your own SparkleServer is a bit difficult.

- The files hosted on Github and Gitorious can be accessed by anyone.

- And probably most importantly: GIT is not a good binary storage solution. So if for example you want to store some movies from your holiday or mp3 files, it will at least double the space required for the files (one for the actual file and one copy in the .git directory).

Install SparkleShare (client) in Ubuntu

The installation instructions are for installing the client for use with Gitorious and Github.


1. Download

SparkleShare is still beta. You can download the latest beta from HERE (0.2 beta 1) or get the latest code via Gitorious.

2. Install the dependencies required to compile and run SparkleShare

sudo apt-get install gtk-sharp2 monodevelop mono-devel libndesk-dbus1.0-cil-dev libndesk-dbus-glib1.0-cil-dev python-nautilus git-core intltool gvfs gvfs-bin python-gtk2-dev openssh-client nant

3. Install SparkleShare

I'll cover the SparkleShare 0.2 beta 1 installation (the difference with getting the code from Git is that you must use ./autogen.sh instead of ./configure): once you've downloaded and extracted the archive, navigate to the folder where you've extracted SparkleShare and run:

./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
sudo make install

If you later want to uninstall it, simply navigate again to this folder and run "sudo make uninstall".

Now everything has been set up and you can run SparkleShare via the Applications > Internet > SparkleShare menu item.

4. Set up SparkleShare

For how to use SparkleShare with Gitorious and Github (as well as other questions), refer to the SparkleShare online documentation.


For more info, see the SparkleShare website.