Fat agree with the need for a headless sync! I want to write a program that lives on my server that keeps my calendar events and to do list items synced with my daily notes, among other things. I’ve had literally (not figuratively) only good experiences with obsidian sync so far over the past few months (a rare achievement!) and would love to keep using it and supporting the obsidian devs with those payments. However, that project is coming up soon and if obsidian sync doesn’t have a headless option by the time I start I will have to switch to something like syncthing or livesync (and minio). Even if I do switch, I would be happy to switch back if OSync gains a headless-compatible client. That is to say, it’s never too late to get my $8/mo back, I just need a headless OSync client!
it’s been 3 years, it’s about time we had this!
I am currently setting up a raspberry pi to automate some tasks on my vault like watching out for certain tags and sorting things/tracking tasks, but that is stuck at square one if sync can’t actually sync!
I am genuinely surprised that this isn’t already a thing. Until now I thought obsidian WAS syncing through some daemon, rather than just through the app itself.
+1 to this. I’d love to set up remote backups on a headless Linux server. I guess with syncthing I could achieve the same, but it would be great to be able to set up some CLI version of Obsidian itself.
This would be game changing. And unlikely to be complex!
This can also be just an API access, or a bit of documentation on how the current clients access the sync servers. I’m sure the community would develop the CLI tool in a heartbeat
I did it. Here’s how: Setting up a headless Obsidian instance for syncing - @rolle / Web designer, web developer
It seems there are different needs for this. Some need (primarily) sync-down (for backups) some need sync-up (for those using a different editor).
For those needing sync-down with a desktop primary device as computer attached to network just save the vault on the network share that does your backups (Unraid w/ Crashplan and Duplicati in my case). If laptop, VPN may be a good option to write back to that same area even on the go, otherwise if you use a desktop with the above solution enough it will sync enough. Laptop in Windows also have a ‘sync to network’ feature. As long as that network feature is also in y our backup path it will be backed up.
For those needing sync-up (if using a different editor and Obsidian Sync service), my best solution is to make sure the obsidian client starts at startup (or on a periodic timer) to do the sync but use VSCode, neovim whatever as an editor, but I do use a desktop as my daily driver.
Another option for either direction that is lighter weight than a VM is to use it in a Docker container with an exposed browser interface if you have docker on some application server on your network (or locally maybe, but might as well use the GUI client in that case). Then you can get a continuously running obsidian for backups. Search ‘obsidian’ on dockerhub.
These are great thoughts - the challenge i think remains to keep this ‘headless’ (i.e. without having the desktop app open on an X instance). A CLI sync version would be super useful. Filen has launched that and it works very well - CLI – Filen – Next Generation End-To-End Encrypted Cloud Storage