Insomnia: [Discussion] Open Source Sync Server?

[tianp]

Been using Insomnia for a few months and since the project is now open source do you have a plan to give users the option to host their own sync server?

I'm sorry if I'm rude because this is basically the project revenue source, just thought it might worth asking.

Cheers.

[gschier]

I'd like to hear what the rest of the community thinks about this. I'm certainly open to discussing the topic.

At the moment, the sync server codebase is still in flux and not designed to be hosted easily. It would need a lot of work to make it "user-friendly", not to mention figure out a way to issue updates.

I'm not that worried about how it will affect revenue. There are plenty of companies (eg. Sentry and GitLab) that use the same open-source model.

[lillesvin]

I think a self-hosted sync server would be beyond awesome, but then again, if it's something that would require a significant effort from the dev's side then I think it should be a very low-priority, nice-to-have thing for the future.

[sapeish]

I think we should work on making Insomnia better for everyone without harming the revenue of the people who gave this all to us for free. Makes no sense to me.

[gschier]

I'm closing this for now but feel free to keep leaving comments.

[xMate420x]

By adding an option to self-host the Insomnia Sync servers, more people would use this instead of proprietary alternatives. And if they would like extended support and things like that, then they can use the offical Insomia Sync servers. Sentry did it really well without affecting the revenue of the company.

[gschier]

I'm actually not concerned about affecting revenue. I think it would have a positive benefit overall.

The main problem is that the server was not originally designed to be open source and thus includes a lot of logic and code specific to running the business (accounting, billing, admin, debugging, etc).

Perhaps in the future I will eventually get around to rewriting it in a more consumable way, but I don't have any plans to do that soon.

[xMate420x]

You could release that code for now without the billing part and people will probably make pull requests that fix most problems

[gschier]

That's the hard part though.. 😢

[xMate420x]

We doesn't need it to be perfect when its released. If its open-source that means we can make our patches if we find some problems. We just need an option for the client to use a custom server and a working version of the server(as i said, it doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to work for now). I think large enterprises and people who like self-hosting would immediately start fixing bugs, and some of them maybe even give donations.

[xMate420x]

I am working on an OSS self-hosted project right now with a small team of people, and this is the REST client we like use, and it being not self-hostable is the only problem we have with it.

[diego-carvallo-tx]

What prevents other people from writing their own sync server without depending on @gschier server code?
In the sense that no one can be forced to release their code as open source, and makes less sense when that code is their way of revenue. People can just write their own sync servers from scratch right?

[xMate420x]

As this project is open-source, reverse engineering a sync server would probably be easy for people that know how to do it. But still, at least having a full documentation for the api or a small python test server would help people make their own servers for the project.

[rohinrohin]

I agree. It would be great if you could give an API spec so the community can build their own custom servers.

Great project btw :+1:

[rohinwork]

Hey @gschier any updates on this? Really looking forward to this feature!

[jirian]

Hi @gschier, I'd also appreciate sync server being open source, or at least a documentation of the API so we can write our own server implementations. And as I see the history of this issue, I think there are a lot of people who'd appreciate this as well. If I can help in any way with this, please, do contact me.

[jirian]

Would anyone be interested in this, either by creating a plugin with the same functionalities as the official synchronization, or by reverse engineering the code in Insomnia which communicates with the sync server and writing our own implementation?

[rohinrohin]

I would be interested to pick this up @jirian. Let's connect?

On Sun, 11 Oct 2020 at 4:27 AM, jirian [e-mail] wrote:

Would anyone be interested in this, either by creating a plugin with the
same functionalities as the official synchronization, or by reverse
engineering the code in Insomnia which communicates with the sync server
and writing our own implementation?

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[jirian]

That'd be great. Which way of communication do you prefer? We can use email, but I'd actually say it'd be easier to just use GitHub issues in a new repo dedicated to the project (e.g. https://github.com/jirian/insomnia-server - it's almost empty so far).