obsidian-sync

Service for synchronising edits to my Obsidian vault accross multiple machines

Synchronisation is managed via a CouchDB database and the LiveSync Obsidian community plugin. The provisioning and deployment of the DB is managed via Docker. See Docker Compose file in this repo.

CouchDB runs on an HP T520 Thin Client (hostname: hpt520-bravo, local IP address: 192.168.178.49) acting as server on my local network. hpt520-bravo is node on my Tailscale network, as are all other devices that want to Sync with the CouchDB server.

In order for LiveSync to work on mobile devices, the CouchDB instance must be served from an HTTPS URL. This is a constraint of the LiveSync plugin. To achieve this, I use the instance of nginx running on my remote VPS to forward incoming HTTPS requests to https://obsidian-sync.systemsobscure.net to the HTTP Tailscale address that is running CouchDB on hpt520-bravo (100.xxx.xxx.xxx:5984). As the VPS is also a node on the Tailscale network, it can forward requests to another node on this network.

Whenever I want to access the CouchDB instance from a device not on the Tailscale network, I can just use the public HTTPS URL. For devices that are on the Tailscale network I can also use the HTTPS URL or the HTTP Tailscale URL so long as it is not a mobile device.