ankisyncd

Anki is a powerful open source flashcard application, which helps you quickly and easily memorize facts over the long term utilizing a spaced repetition algorithm. Anki's main form is a desktop application (for Windows, Linux and macOS) which can sync to a web version (AnkiWeb) and mobile versions for Android and iOS.

This is a personal Anki server, which you can sync against instead of AnkiWeb. It was originally developed by David Snopek to support the flashcard functionality on Bibliobird, a web application for language learning.

This version is a fork of jdoe0/ankisyncd. It supports Python 3 and Anki 2.1.

Contents

• Installing
• Installing (Docker)
• Setting up Anki
  • Anki 2.1
  • Anki 2.0
  • AnkiDroid
• Development
  • Testing
• ENVVAR configuration overrides
• Support for other database backends

Installing

1. Install the dependencies:

    $ pip install -r src/requirements.txt
   

2. Modify ankisyncd.conf according to your needs

3. Create user:

    $ ./ankisyncctl.py adduser <username>
   

4. Setup a proxy to unchunk the requests.

   Webob does not support the header "Transfer-Encoding: chunked" used by Anki and therefore ankisyncd sees chunked requests as empty. To solve this problem setup Nginx (or any other webserver of your choice) and configure it to "unchunk" the requests for ankisyncd.

   For example, if you use Nginx on the same machine as ankisyncd, you first have to change the port in ankisyncd.conf to something other than 27701. Then configure Nginx to listen on port 27701 and forward the unchunked requests to ankisyncd.

   An example configuration with ankisyncd running on the same machine as Nginx and listening on port 27702 may look like (entire config template click me):

server { listen 27701; server_name default;

location / { proxy_http_version 1.0; proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:27702/; } } ```

5. Run ankisyncd:

    $ python -m ankisyncd
   

---

Installing (Docker)

Follow these instructions.

Setting up Anki

Anki 2.1.28 and above

Create a new directory in the add-ons folder (name it something like ankisyncd), create a file named __init__.py containing the code below and put it in the ankisyncd directory.

import os

addr = "http://127.0.0.1:27701/" # put your server address here
os.environ["SYNC_ENDPOINT"] = addr + "sync/"
os.environ["SYNC_ENDPOINT_MEDIA"] = addr + "msync/"

Anki 2.1

Create a new directory in the add-ons folder (name it something like ankisyncd), create a file named __init__.py containing the code below and put it in the ankisyncd directory.

import anki.sync, anki.hooks, aqt

addr = "http://127.0.0.1:27701/" # put your server address here
anki.sync.SYNC_BASE = "%s" + addr
def resetHostNum():
    aqt.mw.pm.profile['hostNum'] = None
anki.hooks.addHook("profileLoaded", resetHostNum)

Anki 2.0

Create a file (name it something like ankisyncd.py) containing the code below and put it in ~/Anki/addons.

import anki.sync

addr = "http://127.0.0.1:27701/" # put your server address here
anki.sync.SYNC_BASE = addr
anki.sync.SYNC_MEDIA_BASE = addr + "msync/"

AnkiDroid

Advanced → Custom sync server

Unless you have set up a reverse proxy to handle encrypted connections, use http as the protocol. The port will be either the default, 27701, or whatever you have specified in ankisyncd.conf (or, if using a reverse proxy, whatever port you configured to accept the front-end connection).

Use the same base url for both the Sync url and the Media sync url, but append /msync to the Media sync url. Do not append /sync to the Sync url.

Even though the AnkiDroid interface will request an email address, this is not required; it will simply be the username you configured with ankisyncctl.py adduser.

Development

Testing

0. Prerequites

This project uses GNU Make to simplify the development commands. It also uses Poetry to manage the Python dependencies. Ensure they are installed.

1. Create a config for your local environment.

$ cp config/.env.example config/.env.local

See ENVVAR configuration overrides for more information.

2. Download Python dependencies.

$ make init

3. Run unit tests.

$ make tests

ENVVAR configuration overrides

Configuration values can be set via environment variables using ANKISYNCD_ prepended to the uppercase form of the configuration value. E.g. the environment variable, ANKISYNCD_AUTH_DB_PATH will set the configuration value auth_db_path

Environment variables override the values set in the ankisyncd.conf.

Support for other database backends

sqlite3 is used by default for user data, authentication and session persistence.

ankisyncd supports loading classes defined via config that manage most persistence requirements (the media DB and files are being worked on). All that is required is to extend one of the existing manager classes and then reference those classes in the config file. See ankisyncd.conf for example config.