How to configure new devices fast

Support Android
1

Hello,

I wanted to ask if there is a fast way to setup new devices. For example if you have 8 android devices you want to use Syncthing on and all devices have like 20 folders (the path of these folders is the same on all devices) that should be synchronized with a server. Some of these folders should be equal on all devices (sync purpose) while others should only be synchronized between the server and the specific device (backup purpose).

I tried to setup one device, create a backup and restore this backup on another device, but the device id is the same and I guess the folder ids are the same too.

Is there an option/way to keep all folder configurations and assign new device and folder ids? That would help a lot.

Cheers

2

If you open up the “GUI Listen Address” setting on the phone to 0.0.0.0:8384 instead of the default, you will have the full power of our REST API for configuration. That can be scripted quite easily to add folders and remote devices, etc. See REST API — Syncthing documentation for starters. You can access it via simple HTTP clients like cURL or with the syncthing cli sub-command from your computer, specifying the --gui-address parameter to point to the phone’s Syncthing instance (see Syncthing — Syncthing documentation).

Not easily, no. For a new device ID, you’d have to delete the *.pem files in Syncthing’s configuration directory, which is protected from random access on Android. Folder IDs could be changed by editing the config.xml file, where the same restrictions apply.

3

full power of our REST API

looks promising, I’ll try that

protected from random access on Android

and there are no plans to introduce functions to edit the device and folder id? or a function to only backup the folder configuration?

thanks for the fast answer!

4

Technically, it seems possible to share Syncthing’s own home folder from Android to other devices without root because the app itself does have access to it (see https://forum.syncthing.net/t/how-to-share-syncthings-own-config-folder/19642/10). While not the best practice, you could then edit the file remotely, wait for it to sync back, then restart Syncthing on Android which will then use the modified configuration.

The same applies to the key and cert files, although I don’t really know what will happen if you delete/replace those while Syncthing is still running.

5

Probably nothing, the certificate is loaded and parsed from the file during startup, and then kept in memory.

6

At least for Folders IDs you can edit them from Actions/Advanced. But I shouldn’t dare cloning too much fields from own device ID (check there, some should be unique : API key, Ur Unique ID, User, Password…)

7

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