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Sync between computers

How your rules, notes, tickets and uncommitted code reach your other computers.

Table of contents

Your Flow home

~/.flow/ holds your rules, notes, settings and tickets. It is a git repository, backed up to a private GitHub repository named flow-home, which your first flow install creates. Never rename it, edit it on GitHub, or make it public: Flow finds it by name.

A project's tickets travel with your Flow home when kept privately, or with the project's own repository on its flow branch: New project.

Add a computer

Install Flow the same way as on the first: Install. The install finds flow-home and downloads your Flow home before the setup starts:

$ flow install
Flow is installed: 10 skills, each typed under the plugin name, as /flow:groundwork.
wrote: ~/.flow/originals/machine, this machine as it was before Flow
named: this machine is macbook-pro
joined: 11 files from pc-wsl, your Flow home as your other machine last sent it
Every line of the install is in ~/.flow/logs/install.log.

Your rules and the skills you switched on everywhere arrive with it. For each project, clone it and type flow init inside: New project.

flow sync

flow sync saves this computer's work as one commit, brings the other computers' work down and merges it, then sends the result up:

$ flow sync
came down: 1 file
went up: pc-wsl: 1 file

Inside a project with tickets on its flow branch, it syncs those too.

You rarely type it. Flow syncs after a reply once 30 minutes have passed, and again when a session ends. Offline, a sync fails quietly, and the next one tries again.

What stays on one computer

Everything in ~/.flow/ travels, apart from:

  • settings.local.json: settings that name a folder on this computer.
  • Logs and records of what happened on this computer.
  • Downloads: skill repositories and each tool's docs. Each computer downloads its own, from the same list.

Files lists every path.

Uncommitted code

Edits you never committed travel with util, a second command Flow installs:

util git uncommitted send   # on the computer you leave
util git uncommitted get    # on the computer you arrive at

They come back unstaged, as you left them. Ignored files stay behind unless listed in .uncommitted-include. A file listed there is pushed to the project's remote, so on a public repository it becomes public.

When 2 computers clash

The same lines of one file changed on both computers stop the sync. Nothing comes down and nothing goes up, and your work stays committed. Merge the file by hand, then sync again.

2 computers can give a private ticket the same number between syncs. The one that reached GitHub first keeps it, and the other takes the next free number:

  home-4 is now home-5: another machine took home-4 first.

The old id still finds it. A ticket on a project's flow branch never clashes, since it gets its number from GitHub.

A computer on an older Flow

A computer on an older Flow syncs nothing, since a newer Flow may have changed the files it would download. A session there opens with:

Flow: pc-wsl is on changelog entry 12, and this machine is on 11. Run flow update in a terminal.

flow update brings it up, and the next flow sync merges both.