Synchronizing Sites with Usync

What I cannot create, I do not understand.
—Richard P. Feynman

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Installation
• Basic usage
• Advanced usage
• Closing remarks

Introduction

Site-to-site synchronizations are usually needed, when two locations, make file updates independently. Let’s say the company MMM has two offices. In the first office, they have the accounting, and logistics departments. In the second office, they have the IT, and HR departments. Both have a common /pub tree, that has subdirectories assigned to each department. Without synchronization, when the first office needs information from the second office, they’d have to pull the updates, manually. With synchronization, the first office can access the files from the second office, as if the IT and HR departments, were in the first office. Usync helps to achieve this. It is written in Scsh. It makes use of Unison, and rsync, for bi- and uni-directional synchronizations, respectively.

Installation

Usync can be installed with Nixpkgs:

$ nix-env -i usync

To check that Usync is indeed installed, run:

$ which usync

Basic usage

To perform two-way synchronization of the directory /pub/mis/doc, between the current host, to the hosts site1 and site2, while preserving the directory structure remotely, run the following command. Take note, that there must be no spaces between the hosts specification, due to the IFS environment variable of the shell:

$ usync /pub/mis/doc/ site1,site2

The command above will perform two-way synchronization of the directory doc/ found under /pub/mis/, to site1:/pub/mis/, and site2:/pub/mis/.

Using your example above, the two-way synchronization system basically tells that if the tree site1:/pub/mis/doc/ contains new and/or updated items, compared with localhost:/pub/mis/doc/, and localhost:/pub/mis/doc/ also happens to have new and/or updated items, then, they will trade updates.

Ideally, the result is that localhost:/pub/mis/doc/, site1:/pub/mis/doc/, and site2:/pub/mis/doc/, are all equal.

Advanced usage

It is also possible to perform synchronization of multiple files, and directories, to remote hosts. To do so, run:

$ usync /pub/mis/doc/ ~/file.txt ~rmm/*.txt site1,site2

The command above will perform two-way synchronization of the paths /pub/mis/doc/, ~/file.txt, and ~rmm/*.txt to the remote hosts site1, and site2, using the same directory structuring system described above.

If you want to perform one-way synchronization, of the above, like rsync, run:

$ usync --one-way --prefer-local /pub/mis/doc/ \
~/file.txt ~rmm/draft.txt site1,site2

For more usage information, run:

$ usync --help

Closing remarks

Some files and regexes are baked in as exclusions. They make or make not make sense. If you think they should be changed, feel free to send a pull request. The sources are available here.

Thanks to Raymund Martinez for the corrections.