What is fcd ?

fcd was inspired by my previous project flash-card and service like Dropbox.
fcd is nothing but a daemon process which syncs all files in a directory with a remote directory so that you can get your important docs even if you switch your hardware (laptops).

Simply put this is yet another dev-tool which solves one of my problem.

Why did I build this ?

During my time at Airtel X Labs, I was introduced to Hacker News by one of my colleague and I really thank him as he has influenced me a lot and shaped me to be the kind of developer I am today.

Back to answering the question, to keep all the best articles I read on HN in one place, I created a Google chrome extension which would save all my favourite articles for me. You can say somewhat similar to Pocket. One issue with flash-card was it could only save links to the web pages and not the document itself.
Also at the same time, I had been maintaining my collection of research papers, white papers, books etc by downloading them and keeping them in a separate folder. So when I made a switch from Airtel X Labs to Swiggy, I had to upload all of them to Google drive and sync when I got a new mac in Swiggy.

I was happy with everything working fine. Soon, my mac crashed (just after I gave an internal talk on Redis in Swiggy) and all of my data went poof!

This could have been prevented if I had regularly kept everything in sync or used Dropbox or Google drive's local setup.

Since Google and Dropbox have a very strict memory usage limits which did not suit my use-case and I also had nothing much to do during this covid lock-down situation, I decided to write my own daemon application which would keep everything in-sync for me.

How to setup ?

The daemon basically needs a few data points before it can start. The daemon is configured to read a YAML file containing all the user data and start the sync process.

Here is a sample yaml config file,

git:
   access_token: "xxxxxx"
   username: "swayam"
   email: "[email protected]"
   private: false

refresh:
   interval: 20
   unit: m

sync:
   - repo: "dc"
     merge: false
     locations:
        - /comic-con/flash/villan/
        - /comic-con/batman/villan/
   - repo: "marvel"
     merge: true
     locations:
        - /comic-con/iron-man/villan/
        - /comic-con/cap-america/villan/

How to actually setup?

1. Generate an access token on github.
2. Define your config file (see above mentioned sample file)
3. Save this file locally
4. Download the setup script using the below command
   curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/swayamraina/fcd/master/setup.sh
5. Run the setup script using this command sh setup.sh
6. Done, It's this simple!

After some time of use, your learning repository should look like this,

Where to go from here ?

• Found a bug?
  You can either report it by mailing me on [email protected] or simply raise an issue here

• Want to contribute?
  You can always raise PRs and add features that you feel will help everyone else.

• What's next?
  I will be revamping the flash-card project and open-sourcing that too.