Org-roam.db across multiple machines?

How To
1

How have people handled org-oam installations running across multiple machines?

With plain old org-mode I’ve had no problem with a directory of .org file, synced across the three machines I use for work and home. But a single shared org-roam directory has turned out to be problematic, as org-roam apparently maintains some kind of file lock on org-roam.db for as long as emacs runs.

If I forget to kill emacs on machine 1, I’ll have an org-roam conflict when I start org-roam on machine 2. My synching mechanism is OneDrive, and the result of a conflict is that I get duplicate copies of org-roam.db with a uniquified name extension. I imagine DropBox, Syncthing, or whatever will have the same problem.

Am I right? Do other people have this problem, and if so, what do you do about it?

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2

Your best bet is to exclude org-roam.db from being synced. This way, your machine would update their db when it’s needed.

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3

As @zaeph said, excluding org-roam.db is the right approach. Here are some more details of my own setup along these lines:

  • My org-roam directory is in a git repository (like most of my other personal files). org-roam.db is excluded via .gitignore.
  • A cron script runs git-sync on each of my machines. That works fine for me because I never use several devices at once.
  • After git-sync, the cron script runs
cd $HOME/org-roam
if [ "` ls -t | head -1`" != "org-roam.db" ]; then
  emacsclient -e '(org-roam-db-build-cache)'
fi

which tells Emacs (always running) to update the cache in org-roam.db if any other file in my org-roam directory has changed.

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@zaeph, thanks. I’ll try that.

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@khinsen, thanks for all those details. I haven’t used git-sync before, but it sounds like now is the time to start.

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Just for all those OneDrive users out there… OneDrive can only exclude entire folders from syncing, not individual files. The solution is to put org-roam.db outside of your OneDrive folder, and to tell org-roam where it is by customizing the variable org-roam-db-location, which should the full path to your org-roam.db file, including the filename.

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For Syncthing users, you can create a .stignore file, similar to a .gitignore. I have added the org-roam.db file to it and this fixed my problems when using org-roam across multiple machines.

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I am using dropbox to sync, and they don’t allow to exclude single files as well.
I have tried your solution, but apparently I can’t change the variable. When I try to save the changed variable I am getting the following error Symbol's value as variable is void: /path/org-roam\.db.

So I managed to solve this by defining the variable directly in the config file
(org-roam-db-location "~/org-roam.db")

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@roi.holtzman, I don’t understand that error message but I’m glad you’ve got a solution now. It’s exactly what I do inside of use-package. Here’s the fragment in my .emacs file:

(use-package org-roam
  :custom
  (org-roam-db-location "~/org-roam.db")
  ;; other configs
  )
1 Like
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It is possible to exclude single files with Dropbox too:

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I had the same issue and added a machine identifier to the database filename. That way, the same init.el can also be shared across machines.

You can use this if each user’s machine has a different host name:
(setq org-roam-db-location (concat "~/org-roam-" system-name ".db"))

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Good to know, thanks. Would you mind sharing the script? Which interval so you use?