Introduction: SparkleShare for OSX, a Dropbox Alternative

I am a recent enthusiast of Dropbox-like services and I was longing for an open-source alternative.

Enters Sparkleshare... http://sparkleshare.org

Since I struggled to install it on my machines, I thought I would log here what I had to do to get to work. This tutorial is probably for the technical minded... If it proves popular I will detail each step.

I installed servers on Fedora (no real problem there) and on Mac OSX (which did take me a while). I only used the clients on Mac OSX so far...

I hope this helps.

Step 1: Sparkleshare on Mac OSX



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on MAC OSX: (server)

- System Preferences : enable remote login (ssh) [ "...type user@address" ]

- install GIT (using git...dmg)

- install Sparkleshare (drag drop in Applications)

- generate keys
ssh-keygen (no passphrase)
cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

- 'fix' ssh for Max OSX
chmod go-w ~/
chmod 700 ~/.ssh
chmod 600 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys

- create empty repository:
git init --bare ~/my_repository.git

- on OSX 10.6.7, git is installed in /usr/bin, nothing to do...
- on OSX 10.6.8, git is installed in /usr/local/git/bin, .bashrc needs to be modified:
echo 'PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/git/bin' >> ~/.bashrc


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on MAX OSX: (client) (note: this can be the same machine as the server machine)

- generate keys
ssh-keygen (no passphrase)

- copy public key to server: (you will be prompted for your server password)
rsync ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub user@adress:tmp.pub      # '~' is 'alt+n' followed by a space

- add key to authorized_keys: (you will be prompted for your server password)
ssh user@adress
cat tmp.pub >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keys     # '~' is 'alt+n' followed by a space
exit

- you can now connect to the server passwordless
ssh user@adress
exit

- start SparkleShare:
check 'my own server'
Address: user@address
Folder Name: /Users/user/my_repository.git




Step 2: Sparkleshare on Fedora


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on Fedora : (server)
(uname -r : 2.6.35.6-45.fc14.i686)

- install sparkleshare
sudo curl -o /etc/yum.repos.d/sparkleshare.repo http://repos.fedorapeople.org/repos/alexh/sparkleshare/fedora-sparkleshare.repo
sudo yum install sparkleshare

- create repository
git init --bare ~/my_repository.git


Voila !