uBrowserSync/README.md

# uBrowserSync

The _uncomplicated browser sync server_ is an implementation of the [xbrowsersync](https://www.xbrowsersync.org/) server API with no external dependencies.

Being written in Go, the server is a standalone statically linked binary; it uses the local filesystem as the datastore
by default and can be built for any operating system and hardware platform supported by the Go compiler, making it ideal
for resource constrained self-hosting scenarios.

## Why

xBrowserSync is a great tool for privacy minded people. The problem with the official server code is about the
software stack. It's written in NodeJS and requires MongoDB for storing data. I don't use NodeJS or MongoDB for anything
else on my VPS so adding a self-hosted xBrowserSync API server would pull in a lot of code and require a lot of
additional resources.

The xBrowserSync API is simple enough to make writing a new server an almost trivial exercise. This was the perfect
opportunity for me to improve my Go programming skills. I'm still very far from being an expert Go developer but it was
worth my time.

## How

### Building

`go install -ldflags="-s -w" -trimpath ./cmd/ubsserver`

### Running

`~/go/bin/ubsserver`

TODO: Suggest deployment setups

## Roadmap

There are a few missing features that I would like to add.

Hig priority:
 - **Enforce storage limit**: it's missing in the current implementation, but it must be implemented to prevent abuse
   
Nice to have:
 - **Rate limiting**: currently it can be enforced by a reverse proxy in front of the API server but would be nice to
   have it as part of the server itself
 - **Front page**: serving a static HTML page on `/`, perhaps with some simple JS to show the service status, should be
   fairly straightforward and would improve the end user experience. The main blocker here is my lack of design skills
   to craft a half decent looking front page
 - **Migration tool**: a tool able to pull your current sync from a server and push it to a different one might come
   handy; the main hurdle is that it would require decrypting the payload and re-encrypting it because the sync ID is
   used as the IV in the AES-GCM encryption process
   
## License

The code is released under the "Unlicense" public domain license. See [UNLICENSE](UNLICENSE) for more details.