dockrsync

dockrsync provides rsync with basic sleep-based scheduling within a docker container. This makes it easy to sync local files remotely without having to set up rsync/cron locally.

Getting

dockrsync can either be build locally by cloning this repo and running make build or can be pulled from DockerHub

docker pull edaniszewski/dockrsync

Example Usage

An example scenario for how dockrsync could be used: you are developing an application for the Raspberry Pi. Instead of developing directly on the Pi, you want to develop on your machine. dockrsync can be used to sync the local project files to the Raspberry Pi. Assuming SSH is already set up on the Pi, you will need to enable password-less SSH by using SSH keys.

There are plenty of tutorials how to do this elsewhere in more detail, but briefly this would be generating a key on your dev machine via ssh-keygen, then copying the public key over to the Pi at ~/.ssh/authorized_keys. Once that is done you should be able to manually SSH into the Pi without a password.

At this point, you can use dockrsync to start syncing files:

docker run \
    -v `pwd`:/sync \
    -v $HOME/.ssh:/root/.ssh \
    -e SYNC_USER=pi \
    -e SYNC_HOST=192.168.1.10 \
    -e SYNC_DIR="~/dev/pi-project" \
    -e RESYNC=10 \
    edaniszewski/dockrsync

Breaking down what each of the options above does:

-v `pwd`:/sync: Mounts the current directory onto /sync of the container. This assumes that the data you want to sync between local and remote exists in the current directory. Anything found in /sync in the container will be synced to remote.
-v $HOME/.ssh:/root/.ssh: Mounts the contents of .ssh into the container's .ssh directory. This assumes that the key you are using resides in your ~/.ssh directory.
-e SYNC_USER=pi: Set the SSH login user. In this example, that username is "pi".
-e SYNC_HOST=192.168.1.10: Set the remote host address for SSH.
-e SYNC_DIR="~/dev/pi-project": Set the directory for which the data in /sync will be synced to on the remote machine. In this case, we are syncing the data to ~/dev/pi-project on the Raspberry Pi.
-e RESYNC=10: Set the sleep interval (in seconds) between rsync runs.

To simplify the run command, you can also use an env file to specify the environment parameters, e.g. if you had a file, env,

SYNC_USER=pi
SYNC_HOST=192.168.1.10
SYNC_DIR=~/dev/pi-project
RESYNC=10

then dockrsync can be run with

docker run \
    -v `pwd`:/sync \
    -v $HOME/.ssh:/root/.ssh \
    --env-file env  \
    edaniszewski/dockrsync

Troubleshooting / Issues

If you run into issues or have suggestions for dockrsync, feel free to open an issue. If you are reporting a bug, please provide as much context as possible.

License

dockrsync is licensed under the MIT license - see the LICENCE file.