Seafile (Server) Community Manual

Tutorial
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Seafile Community Manual

I am happy to announce that the Seafile Community Manual was just released today (27.10.2018). It is now searchable via your favourite search engine as well.

https://seafile.readthedocs.io

Why another manual?

The idea of this community driven manual is to make it possible for new and existing Seafile users to get an easy start and be able to mantain their Seafile server. Another goal is to provide somewhat of a structure on each step required to reach a certain goal rather than a collection of information spread over a confusing and hard to read server manual.

Several people have tried in the past to motivate the Seafile devs to restructure the original manual but failed. Since Seafile CE is OpenSource we don’t have to wait and can create a manual of our own.

This manual might not contain all information that the original manual provides but it aims to provide what is necessary to keep Seafile running as best-practice setup.

Contribution

The manual will only be as good as it’s contributors. It is not possible to mantain it with one or two contributors, we need a bunch of people from the community to do that.

I know that there are quiet a few people that invested their time into a manual of their own. It would be really nice if those people contributed their time and knowledge into the CE manual, even if it’s in small steps.

We are also looking for people that help maintain, check and approve Github pull requests as well. If you consider yourself a Seafile server advanced admin please let @DerDanilo know so that he can provide you with write access to the Github repository.

Please refrain from any discussion about Github or readthedocs in this threat as this is about the manual and not about personal oppinion. Those services were selected as they are free and support OpenSource projects.

How to contribute?

It helps a lot if you know how to use GIT or at least know your way arround usage of the Github GUI.

It is important that you issue “commits” for every page that you edit. This makes it easier to approve or deny certain things when double checking.

Please try to avoid huge pull requests as it’s generally harder to read and requires more time to go through.
Small steps are just fine. :slight_smile:

Issue found!

Awesome! Please report it into directly into Github GitHub issues.

This forum thread is not the right medium to find the (possible) tons of typos, broken links and logical erros.
The contributors of the manual are greatful for your effort of reporting the issue properly and can fix it soon. :wink:

Previous posts concerning this manual:

https://forum.seafile.com/t/community-manual-looking-for-people-to-help-maintain/
https://forum.seafile.com/t/how-to-best-practise-seafile-server-manual/
https://forum.seafile.com/t/best-practices-guide-for-seafile-installation-on-ubuntu-server/

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Hi and thanks for this work.

But there are some dead links in this manual, for example BackupSeafileData and BackupSeafielInstall from the chapter Docs » Backup/Restore » Backup » Tar

Perhaps the code of such scripts should be included in the manual or a server side script should check the links sometimes. Otherwise it is hard to follow the backup instruction (for example) without the according scripts.

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Fixed in my pull request. You just can fork it and commit to it.

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Hey

Do you need any documentation for Arch ARM? Arch 64Bit is quite similar but I’m running the Seafile server on Arch ARM (Raspberry) and I documented.

I haven’t checked you whole website yet but I saw that you haven’t Arch in your list.

Anyhow, if you’re interested let me know.

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The question is if the community needs it. So I guess the answers is yes. :wink:
The manual contains parts for raspb installation, but as far as I remember they are not complete.
You are welcome to extend the documents (multiple files based on the structure of the manual)

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https://seafile.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backup/backup-tar/#backup-installation
all the backup section actually is useless since the backup script download link is not working.

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There’s just been a misplaced " at the end. I’ve fixed it.

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You could’ve also submited a fix for the broken link. Your feedback sounds very demanding. Please remember that this is a community project. It doesn’t work if the community doesn’t contribute, that may also include you. :wink:

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I do contribute on various non-profit/foss software I do am aware of what means community/contributing and I will contribute to this project also, when I do have enough knowledge.

If only I knew which one should be the correct link I could fix it myself. But I did’t see that wrong " in the link and though it was just broken/offline.

Finally I wasn’t demanding, that was not my intention, just pointing out something that doesn’t work. Maybe I just used wrong words, since english is not my motherlanguage.

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The idea of this community driven manual is to make it possible for new and existing Seafile users to get an easy start and be able to mantain their Seafile server. Another goal is to provide somewhat of a structure on each step required to reach a certain goal rather than a collection of information spread over a confusing and hard to read server manual.