Nuxeo Drive - Desktop Synchronization Client for Nuxeo

This is an ongoing development project for desktop synchronization of local folders with remote Nuxeo workspaces.

Watch this screencast to get a 6 min overview of this project.

See USERDOC/Nuxeo Drive for complete up-to-date documentation.

License

The source code of Nuxeo Drive is available under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1 described in LICENSE.txt.

Though, Nuxeo Drive depends on the PyQt component that is available under the following licenses:

• GNU General Public License v2
• GNU General Public License v3
• PyQt Commercial License
• PyQt Embedded License

Therefore the binary packages resulting of the assembly of the Nuxeo Drive source code and all the third-party libraries that it depends on, among which PyQt, are available under one of the licenses listed above. Indeed, the binary packages are subject to the licenses of the sources from which they have been built. As the GNU General Public Licenses and the PyQt Commercial License are stronger than the GNU Lesser General Public License, these are the ones that apply.

Thus any code written on the top of Nuxeo Drive must be distributed under the terms of one of the licenses available for PyQt.

Install

Installing Nuxeo Drive requires two components: a server addon for the Nuxeo Platform and a desktop program on the user's computer.

Server-Side Marketplace Package

Getting the Marketplace Package

Stable releases for Nuxeo Drive are available as a Marketplace package from the Nuxeo Online Services portal: https://connect.nuxeo.com/nuxeo/site/marketplace/package/nuxeo-drive

You can also fetch the latest development version of the Marketplace package for the Nuxeo master branch from the Continuous Integration server (use at your own risk).

Installing the Marketplace Package

The Marketplace package can be installed using the Admin Center / Update Center / Local Packages interface of a Nuxeo server.

Alternatively, from the command line:

$NUXEO_HOME/bin/nuxeoctl stop
$NUXEO_HOME/bin/nuxeoctl mp-install --nodeps marketplace-<version>.zip
$NUXEO_HOME/bin/nuxeoctl start

Clients

Ubuntu/Debian (and Other Linux Variants) Client

The .deb package of the client is not yet available. In the mean time you can install it from source code.

First note that Nuxeo Drive uses Extended file attributes through the xattr Python wrapper.

On Linux, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X, xattrs are enabled in the default kernel.

On Linux, depending on the distribution, you may need a special mount option (user_xattr) to enable them for a given file system, e.g.:

sudo mount -oremount,user_xattr /dev/sda3

Make sure that the latest version of pip is installed:

sudo easy_install -U pip

Then install the required system and Python packages and the Nuxeo Drive code itself:

sudo apt-get install python-pip python-dev python-qt4 libffi-dev
sudo pip install -U -r https://raw.github.com/nuxeo/nuxeo-drive/master/requirements.txt
sudo pip install -U -r https://raw.github.com/nuxeo/nuxeo-drive/master/unix-requirements.txt
sudo pip install -U git+https://github.com/nuxeo/nuxeo-drive.git

Waiting for NXDRIVE-62 to be resolved you need to run these commands for Nuxeo Drive to work fine:

# increase inotify file watch limit
ofile=/proc/sys/fs/inotify/max_user_instances
sudo sh -c "echo 8192 > $ofile"
cat $ofile

Mac OSX Desktop Client

Once the Marketplace package is installed, the Mac OS X desktop client package can be downloaded from the Home > Nuxeo Drive tab.

You can also fetch the latest development version for Mac OS X from the our Continous Integration server.

Windows Desktop Client

Once the Marketplace package is installed, the Windows desktop client package can be downloaded from the Home > Nuxeo Drive tab.

You can also fetch the latest development version for nuxeo-drive--win32.msi Windows installer from our Continuous Integration server.

Once you installed the package (Administrator rights required) the new folder holding the ndrive.exe and ndrivew.exe programs will be added to your Path environment variable automatically.

You can start the Nuxeo Drive program from the "Start..." menu.

All the necessary dependencies (such as the Python interpreter and the QT / PyQt for the client side user interface) are included in this folder and should not impact any alternative version you may have already installed on your computer.

Configuration and Usage

Regular Usage

1. Launch the Nuxeo Drive program (e.g. from the Start menu under Windows).

   A new icon should open in the system tray and a popup menu should open asking the user for the URL of the Nuxeo server and credentials.

2. In the Nuxeo web interface, mark workspaces and folders for synchronization.

3. You can now go to the local Nuxeo Drive folder by using the menu of the system tray icon.

Command-Line Usage (Advanced)

The desktop synchronization client can also be operated from the command-line:

1. Make sure that the ndrive program is installed in a folder that has been added to the PATH enviroment variable of your OS.

   • You can check by typing the ndrive --help command in a console.

   • If you installed the .dmg package for OSX, the binary is:

   /Applications/Nuxeo\ Drive.app/Contents/MacOS/ndrive
   

   • You can alias it in your bashrc with:

   alias ndrive="/Applications/Nuxeo\ Drive.app/Contents/MacOS/ndrive"
   

2. Launch Nuxeo Drive (no automatic background mode yet, this will come in future versions):

   ndrive
   

   Under Windows you can launch ndrivew.exe instead to avoid keeping the cmd console open while Nuxeo Drive is running instead.

3. The first time you run this command a dialog window will open asking for the URL of the Nuxeo server and your user credentials.

   Alternatively you can bind to a Nuxeo server with your user credentials using the following commandline arguments:

   ndrive bind-server nuxeo-username http://server:port/nuxeo --password secret
   

   This will create a new folder called Nuxeo Drive in your home folder under Linux and MacOSX and under the Documents folder under Windows.

4. Go to your Nuxeo with your browser, navigate to workspaces or folder where you have permission to create new documents.

5. Click on the Nuxeo Drive icon right of the title of the folder to treat this folder as a new synchronization root.

   Alternatively you can do this operation from the commandline with:

   ndrive bind-root "/default-domain/workspaces/My Workspace"
   

   You can now create office documents and folders locally or inside Nuxeo and watch them getting synchronized both ways automatically.

For more options, type:

ndrive --help
ndrive subcommand --help

Reporting Issues

1. Generate a bug report in the Advanced tab of the Settings panel of the Nuxeo Drive client.

   You can also log DEBUG information directly in the console by using the following command-line:

   ndrive --log-level-console=DEBUG
   

2. Create a GitHub issue mentionning the version of the Nuxeo Platform, your operating system name and version (e.g. Windows 7), the steps to reproduce the error and a copy of the logs.

3. For long running sessions, it is better to dump the debug information in a log file. This can be done with the following command:

   ndrive --log-level-file=DEBUG
   

   or even:

   ndrive --log-level-file=TRACE
   

   By default the location of the log file is: ~/.nuxeo-drive/logs/ where ~ stands for the location of the user folder. For instance:

   • Under Windows 7 and 8: C:\Users\username\.nuxeo-drive\logs
   • Under Mac OS X: /Users/username/.nuxeo-drive/logs
   • Under Ubuntu (and other Linux variants): /home/username/.nuxeo-drive/logs

Roadmap

The backlog is handled on JIRA.

Developing on Nuxeo Drive

See the contributor guide if you wish to actually contribute to the Nuxeo Drive code base.