bvandeusen
452c66c8ef
Until now every sync was a button press. Pull-to-refresh made asking cheaper; it
did not stop the app needing to be asked, which on a phone means a note written
on the bus reaches the desktop whenever you next happen to open the app.
Three moments, and they are deliberately not the same job:
* **Coming to the front**, if the last sync is over five minutes old or there
is unsent work. Not on every foreground: stepping out to copy a link and
stepping back is not a request for fresh notes, and syncing on every app
switch spends someone's mobile data telling them what they are looking at.
* **Going away with unsent work** — handed to WorkManager rather than run
inline, because the process is about to stop being a priority and a sync
started there would be killed halfway. This is the one that matters most: it
is what gets a note off a phone that then goes into a pocket for the night.
* **Every fifteen minutes**, network-constrained. Fifteen is not a preference,
it is WorkManager's floor for periodic work; asking for less gets fifteen.
**An automatic sync must not raise an error banner.** Someone who pulled the
board down is owed an answer; someone who merely opened the app did not ask a
question, and answering it with a red banner about an unreachable server makes
their own notes look broken when nothing of theirs is. So `syncNow` and
`syncQuietly` differ in exactly one thing — whether failure is announced. The
quiet channel for a persistent problem is the drawer badge, from `has_pending`,
which does not care how the attempt was made.
**There is a switch, defaulting to on.** Linking a server IS the consent; a
person who paired a device and then had to find a second toggle before anything
moved would reasonably call that broken. It lives in SharedPreferences rather
than the store: everything else in sync state describes the PAIRING and must
survive a reinstall, while this describes how one handset behaves, and someone
turning it off on their phone is not asking their laptop to stop. The copy says
what "automatically" means in minutes and says that off is not off — a switch
next to a Disconnect button invites exactly that misreading.
The schedule is DECLARED as a function of (linked, switch) in a LaunchedEffect
rather than toggled from the places that change them. There are four routes to
"should not be syncing on its own" and a call at each is four chances to leave a
phone quietly syncing after it was told to stop.
`ON_START`/`ON_STOP`, not resume/pause — the same choice the editor's save-on-
leave makes, because pause fires for anything covering the window and a sync per
notification-shade pull is not automatic sync, it is a stutter.
RECEIVE_BOOT_COMPLETED now appears in the merged manifest. WorkManager
contributes it so the schedule survives a restart; commented in AndroidManifest
because it shows in the app's permission list and nothing else in that file
would explain it.
Two things read from artifacts rather than recalled, both of which memory would
have got wrong: `work-runtime-ktx` is an empty 6 KB stub as of 2.11 with
`CoroutineWorker` and `PeriodicWorkRequestBuilder` moved into `work-runtime`, so
the dependency is on the latter alone; and `Switch` is not experimental in
material3 1.4.0, so no `@OptIn` — an unnecessary one is itself a warning.
Also adds `android/tools/check-strings.py`, after this change added three
strings: `R` is generated, so `R.string.typo` type-checks whether or not the
string exists. It catches a missing name, `stringResource` on a plural or the
reverse, and a format taking more arguments than the call passes. Verified
against a tree with one of each fault — its first version counted Kotlin's
trailing commas as arguments and called three correct sites broken, which is the
failure that teaches you to ignore a tool.
Two comments in this change were wrong when written and are corrected here
rather than left: the flag check in SyncWorker does NOT avoid opening the store,
because Application.onCreate has already run by the time any Worker starts.
ThoughtSync
Self-hosted personal thought-capture web app in the FabledSword family — a
Google-Keep-style masonry post-it board for capturing disparate thoughts in
under a second, designed to grow into a lightweight second brain (labels, search,
[[wiki-links]], graph).
- Stack: Quart (async Python) + Vue 3 + PostgreSQL, Docker, Fabled-Git CI.
- Auth: native email + password (signed-cookie sessions). Multi-user with the family owner + direct-share + group-share ACL.
- Web-first. An Android companion is a later, conditional milestone.
Layout
src/thoughtsync/ Quart app (app factory, auth, models, ACL, config, db)
alembic/ async migrations (schema built via `alembic upgrade head`)
tests/ DB-free unit tests (pytest)
frontend/ Vue 3 + Vite + TypeScript + Tailwind SPA
Dockerfile 2-stage build (Vue -> python:3.12-slim runtime)
docker-compose.yml local app + Postgres stack
Development
Backend (needs a Postgres reachable at THOUGHTSYNC_DATABASE_URL):
pip install -e ".[dev]"
alembic upgrade head
hypercorn 'thoughtsync.app:create_app()' --bind 0.0.0.0:5000
Frontend (proxies /api to :5000):
cd frontend
npm install
npm run dev # http://localhost:5173
Or run it in Docker. Hot-reload dev stack (edit code, changes reload live) — Postgres + backend + Vite dev server, app at http://localhost:5173:
docker compose -f docker-compose.dev.yml up
Or the full production image (SPA baked in) at http://localhost:5000:
docker compose up --build
Deploy (self-host)
A complete two-container stack (app + Postgres) you can copy and run. Save it as
docker-compose.yml, change the two CHANGE_ME passwords (they must match), then
docker compose up -d:
services:
db:
image: postgres:16-alpine
restart: unless-stopped
environment:
POSTGRES_USER: thoughtsync
POSTGRES_PASSWORD: CHANGE_ME # change this
POSTGRES_DB: thoughtsync
volumes:
- thoughtsync-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
healthcheck:
test: ["CMD-SHELL", "pg_isready -U thoughtsync"]
interval: 5s
timeout: 5s
retries: 10
app:
image: git.fabledsword.com/bvandeusen/thoughtsync:latest # :dev for the current dev build
restart: unless-stopped
depends_on:
db:
condition: service_healthy
environment:
THOUGHTSYNC_DATABASE_URL: postgresql+asyncpg://thoughtsync:CHANGE_ME@db:5432/thoughtsync
volumes:
- thoughtsync-data:/var/thoughtsync # uploaded images; omit if you don't use attachments
ports:
- "5000:5000"
volumes:
thoughtsync-db:
thoughtsync-data:
Then open http://<host>:5000 and register — the first account becomes the admin.
- Only
THOUGHTSYNC_DATABASE_URLis required.THOUGHTSYNC_SECRET_KEYis optional; if unset, a signing key is generated and persisted in the database (sessions survive restarts). - Uploaded images live under the
thoughtsync-datavolume at/var/thoughtsync. - The app waits for the database and runs migrations (
alembic upgrade head) automatically on start. - Image tags:
:latest(stable, built frommain) ·:dev(latestdevbuild) ·:<git-sha>(immutable, for pinning / rollback). - Install as an app (PWA): ThoughtSync is installable ("Add to Home Screen" / the
browser's install button) for an app-like window. Browsers only offer install over a
secure context, so put the app behind a reverse proxy terminating HTTPS (or reach
it via
localhost) — plainhttp://<host>:5000won't show the install prompt.
Milestones
- M0 — Foundation & Identity ✅: Quart+Vue+Postgres skeleton, native auth, sharing-ACL spine, Fabled-Git CI.
- M1 — Capture Core ✅: note model + masonry board (quick-add, colors, pin, edit-in-place, archive, trash+restore).
- M1.5 — Roles & DB-backed Settings ✅: first user is admin, admin Settings UI,
DATABASE_URLis the only required env. - M2 — Organize: labels/tags, search, checklists, attachments.
- M3 — Second-brain seeds:
[[wiki-links]], backlinks, graph view, reminders. - M4 — Launch hardening: responsive/PWA, settings UI, polish.
Work happens on dev; main is protected (PR-only).