ANN: sg-replicate tool to replicate data between Sync Gateway instances

[Traun Leyden]

Hey couchbase mobile community,  

I'm happy to announce a new experimental tool available for driving a replication between Sync Gateway instances:

https://github.com/couchbaselabs/sg-replicate

It was created because currently there is no good way to drive replications between Sync Gateway instances from a server machine, since Sync Gateway can only act as a passive participant in a replication.  

While it's true that it would be possible to could run Couchbase Lite Java on a server, and setup push and pull replications to shuttle data between the Sync Gateway instances, it would be slower, more complex, and there would be higher storage requirements.  (OTOH sg-replicate simply shuttles data back and forth, and doesn't have any persistent storage or any persistent state whatsoever).  To reduce the storage requirements, Couchbase Lite could be re-worked to support remote-remote replications, like CouchDB does, however that would add a lot of complexity to the code.  Plus, it would put the Couchbase Lite Java/Android code out of sync with the iOS reference implementation.

sg-replicate is still in the alpha / experimental stage, but it's undergone enough unit and field testing to release to the community for feedback.  

It's written in Go and available as open source under the Apache 2 License.

If you run into any problems or have any questions, feel free to post to this group or file a github issue.  

Quickstart

* Install Go from http://golang.org/doc/install and define $GOPATH environment variable

* $ go get -u -v github.com/couchbaselabs/sg-replicate

* $ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/couchbaselabs/sg-replicate/cli

* $ cp config.json.example config.json

* Customize config.json according to your needs.

* $ go build && ./cli