Basic Setup

This guide details an initial setup of an EteSync server. It is specifically written for Ubuntu, but you should be able to use it as a guide for different systems as well. Making a separate user to run the application is also recommended.

Download EteSync server

First we install the Python virtual environment package, clone the repo, set up the virtual environment and install the Python dependencies.

apt-get install python3-virtualenv

cd ~  # To set up the server in your home dir
git clone https://github.com/etesync/server-skeleton.git
cd server-skeleton

virtualenv -p python3 venv  # If doesn't work, try: virtualenv3 venv
source venv/bin/activate

pip3 install -r requirements.txt

Configure the application

To configure the application, you need a Django .ini file. Luckily, the repo already contains a basic ini called etesync-server.ini.example which we can copy.

cp etesync-server.ini.example etesync-server.ini

Open the file, and set allowed hosts to *. (Note: this is just for testing purposes. Set this to your domain name later.)

It should now look like this:

[global]
secret_file = secret.txt
debug = false
;Advanced options, only uncomment if you know what you're doing:
;static_root = /path/to/static
;static_url = /static/
;language_code = en-us
;time_zone = UTC

[allowed_hosts]
allowed_host1 = example.com

[database]
engine = django.db.backends.sqlite3
name = db.sqlite3

Test the application

After initialising the server, you can run it for the first time.

./manage.py migrate
./manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

On the machine, you can now surf to localhost:8000 and it should show a page saying "It works!" If you're on a different machine than the one running the server, surf to its local IP address followed by the portnumber, e.g. 192.168.x.x:8000.

If this works, congratulations! You now have a functioning Django application.

Using this server in production is not recommended, so please continue to this page to set up a proper deployment.