fgribreau/filesync

:busts_in_silhouette: Unidirectional 1-N file syncing with history and local merging

Unidirectional 1-N file syncing with history and local merging

This is a proof of concept AND a work in progress, don't share the word, yet.

Motivation

“We are in 2015 and my students still have to copy what I wrote on a screen while I teach them something. This is a long and tedious process that slow down the lectures.

Google Document-like tools should NEVER be used for sharing code, we want syntax highlighting and static analysis not copy/pasting code inside an online document each time we make a change.

Online IDEs are NOT a solution. I have my own finely tuned editor, my students have theirs, we don't want to temporarily trade our workflow comfort for a lecture.

Both solution are stupid.

I want a tool that will allow each student to retrieve in real-time my edits while keeping their own local modifications. This tool will work with any editor/IDE because we sync at the file-system level. Each modification will be displayed in an history log and would be either merged locally or dropped definitely.”

— 03/06/2015

Current status

FileSync was first made during a lecture on AngularJS/Socket.io/NodeJS with IUT Nantes students on 3rd March 2015.

Setup

npm i filesync -g
filesync-server
filesync-relay /path/to/directory

How to contribute

• Fork the project
• Clone it on your computer
• Run npm install inside filesync/
• Let's do this!

Changelog

Contribute / TODO

See issues there is still a lot of things to do/improve note that I will happily merge any pull-requests that solve each of the specified issues.

Bonus

Since this tool is primary build for teaching, it will also display the number of students that don't currently have the page on focus using HTML5 Page Visibility API. (But yeah they can always open another browser window, in the end that feature was mainly developed for fun...)

filesync's Issues

Add "Merge locally" button

Once clicked, this button should merge the remote file change to the local file system.

Make the UI "beautiful", because who wants to use something ugly?

Improve Visibility state UI

Use directives and partial templates for HistoryCtrl instead of raw index.html

Impossible installation on Windows 8

Hello,

I tried to install filesync on my computer with npm i filesync -g
I got this output on my command prompt:

I have bower installed globally.
My config:

Windows 8.1 x64
node v0.12.2

Please, can someone tell me it's easy to fix ?
Thanks. ^^

Display viewers names

Don't use VisibilityService inside HistoryService

The two should be break appart

Merge changes (on the client-side) on the same file into one history line

On the client-side, if we receive a file:changed event on a file already display, simple update this file content and bring it back to the top of the history.

i18n support using ng-translate

e.g. " ... aucun historique... mais que fait le prof !" in index.html

Add a UI notifier to inform user about socket.io connection state

console.log('connected'); // @todo display it on screen using a notifier

Error highlightjs, can't show updated file's content

We succesfully launched relay.js and server.js on IUT's computers but when we change a file, on the web page an element show up containing the date and the file's name like usual. The content of the file don't show and a angular-highlightjs error appears in the console :

"Error: hljs is undefined
.$get@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular-highlightjs/angular-highlightjs.js:47:8
invoke@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:4219:14
createInjector/instanceCache.$injector<@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:4037:20
getService@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:4178:39
invoke@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:4210:1
$ControllerProvider/this.$get</</<@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:8516:11
nodeLinkFn/<@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7762:13
forEach@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:334:11
nodeLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7761:11
compositeLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7140:13
compositeLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7143:13
compositeLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7143:13
nodeLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7786:1
compositeLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7140:13
compositeLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7143:13
publicLinkFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7019:30
createBoundTranscludeFn/boundTranscludeFn@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7158:1
controllersBoundTransclude@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:7818:18
ngRepeatAction@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:24822:15
$watchCollectionAction@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:14279:13
$RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$digest@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:14412:23
$RootScopeProvider/this.$get</Scope.prototype.$apply@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:14675:13
timeout/timeoutId<@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:16423:25
completeOutstandingRequest@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:4940:7
Browser/self.defer/timeoutId<@http://127.0.0.1:3000/components/angular/angular.js:5328:7
"

After some searches , we found that the content of the file was well send to the page under edit.content. The error is on "hljs" in line :

<div hljs src="edit.content">
     <textarea></textarea>
</div>

However it seems to work on everyone else personal computer.

file-diff between local files and remote files

Use HTML5 FileReader & FileWriter API (google chrome only)

SocketIOService.onFileChanged & .onVisibilityStatesChanged should throw an exception if a listener is already set

Use update-notifier

https://github.com/yeoman/update-notifier