This is a new feature in v1.0 of TubeSync and later. It allows you to use a custom existing external database server instead of the default SQLite database. You may want to use this if you encounter performance issues with adding very large or a large number of channels and database write contention (as shown by errors in the log) become an issue.
TubeSync supports SQLite (the automatic default) as well as PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB. For MariaDB just follow the MySQL instructions as the driver is the same.
You should start with a blank install of TubeSync. Migrating to a new database will reset your database. If you are comfortable with Django you can export and re-import existing database data with:
$ docker exec -i tubesync python3 /app/manage.py dumpdata > some-file.json
Then change you database backend over, then use
$ cat some-file.json | docker exec -i tubesync python3 /app/manage.py loaddata --format=json -
As detailed in the Django documentation:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/django-admin/#dumpdata
and:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/ref/django-admin/#loaddata
Further instructions are beyond the scope of TubeSync documenation and you should refer to Django documentation for more details.
If you are not comfortable with the above, then skip the dumpdata
steps, however
remember you will start again with a completely new database.
You need to create a database and a user with permissions to access the database in your chosen external database server. Steps vary between PostgreSQL, MySQL and MariaDB so this is up to you to work out.
You need to provide the database connection details to TubeSync via an environment
variable. The environment variable name is DATABASE_CONNECTION
and the format is the
standard URL-style string. Examples are:
postgresql://tubesync:password@localhost:5432/tubesync
and
mysql://tubesync:password@localhost:3306/tubesync
Important note: For MySQL databases make SURE you create the tubesync database with
utf8mb4
encoding, like:
CREATE DATABASE tubesync CHARACTER SET utf8mb4 COLLATE utf8mb4_0900_ai_ci;
Without utf8mb4
encoding things like emojis in video titles (or any extended UTF8
characters) can cause issues.
Once you start TubeSync with the new database connection you should see the folling log entry in the container or stdout logs:
2021-04-04 22:42:17,912 [tubesync/INFO] Using database connection: django.db.backends.postgresql://tubesync:[hidden]@localhost:5432/tubesync
If you see a line similar to the above and the web interface loads, congratulations, you are now using an external database server for your TubeSync data!