I have been playing around with Self hosting my Obsidian vaults. I pay for Obsidian sync for my main vault right now, but I started a new job, and I’m looking into working with multiple vaults to keep things tidy. Now, Obsidian sync is a great working solution to sync your data, but there are other options out there, like Selfhosted obsidian-livesync (the one we are looking at here), Remote Save and syncing your vault via SyncThing.

I opted to try out obsidian-livesync via a self hosted database because I also want my vault to be available on iOS devices.

Setting up the stuff

obsidian-livesync can use different backends for syncing (some of which are in beta at the time of writing this) but I chose to go for the CoucheDB route. I decided I wanted to run it in Docker, and because I wanted to test it out first on my machine and then in the home lab I wrote it up in Terraform and Terragrunt. That’s a bit overkill for a simple container, but it’s the tool set I use.

All the setup is also in the README of this repo

Setting up the container

Credits to Alex Jegtnes and his blogpost about it, this setup is based on his blogpost. This is basically just a “Took that how-to and put it into Infra as Code” blogpost. I also choose to leave out the reverse proxy because I have other ways of securely exposing the container to my machines in the homelab.

We will first need a container with a custom config for our CoucheDB deployment. Clone the repo and let’s get started.

$ git clone git@github.com:KingOfSpades/coucheDBviaTerragrunt.git

We built this container from our repo using:

$ cd coucheDBviaTerragrunt
$ docker build ./CoucheDBContainer -t custom_obsidian_sync:v1.0

Let’s inspect if we did this correctly:

$ docker history custom_obsidian_sync:v1.0
IMAGE          CREATED              CREATED BY                                      SIZE      COMMENT
47074646b3f3   About a minute ago   EXPOSE map[5984/tcp:{}]                         0B        buildkit.dockerfile.v0
<missing>      About a minute ago   COPY local.ini /opt/couchdb/etc/local.ini # …   515B      buildkit.dockerfile.v0
<missing>      8 months ago         CMD ["/opt/couchdb/bin/couchdb"]                0B        buildkit.dockerfile.v0
<missing>      8 months ago         EXPOSE map[4369/tcp:{} 5984/tcp:{} 9100/tcp:…   0B        buildkit.dockerfile.v0
<missing>      8 months ago         VOLUME [/opt/couchdb/data]                      0B        buildkit.dockerfile.v0
...

The Terraform

Basically just a module with 2 inputs and two outputs. You supply it with a couchdb_user and a couchdb_password. It will output the URL you can visit the installation on.

Tip: Don’t forget to check the correct socket for your Docker runtime in sync-module/prod/main.tf:12. You can find this by running docker context ls

The Terragrunt

Now with terragrunt we apply our module a little bit easier. We could even add the variables to the terragrunt.hcl file for easier deployment, but let’s not add our credentials to our code hm’k?

Deploy your code with

$ terragrunt apply

Supply a PASSWORD and USERNAME on the CLI and you should be ok to go,

After deployment, you should be able to access your CoucheDB instance on: http://localhost:5984/_utils/

Setting up sync

Setting up sync can be done by following the instructions provided by obsidian-livesync

Closing thoughts

With s3 as an end-point being in beta right now, I might also give that a try. I had mixed results in the last 4 weeks I have been testing the selfhosted obsidian-livesync and I’m a bit weary about putting my trust in it. I might just pay extra to sync another vault or go mono vault again.