syncthing setup exclusively with CLI

syncthing-setup-exclusively-with-CLI.md

After long searching I did not find a good description of how to set up Syncthing that works exclusively via CLI without using a Web browser on the devices.

This is useful for example on a headless Raspberry Pi without proxying web-traffic through SSH or with port-forwarding limitations. In this example we will want to share the default folder from Machine A with Machine B

Machine A	Machine B
Install Syncthing On debian: sudo apt install syncthing On fedora: sudo dnf install syncthing Generate device ID and config files and default folder syncthing generate Start Syncthing syncthing --no-browser Get the device id syncthing --device-id	Install Syncthing On debian: sudo apt install syncthing On fedora: sudo dnf install syncthing Generate device ID and config files and default folder syncthing generate Start Syncthing syncthing --no-browser Get the device id syncthing --device-id
Add Machine B syncthing cli config devices add --device-id $DEVICE_ID_B	Add Machine A syncthing cli config devices add --device-id $DEVICE_ID_A
Share default folder with Machine B syncthing cli config folders $FOLDER_ID devices add --device-id $DEVICE_ID_B Insert the id from the folder you want to share into $FOLDER_ID
	Accept default folder from Machine A syncthing cli config devices $DEVICE_ID_A auto-accept-folders set true If you don't want Machine B automatically accepting all of Machine A's folder requests, just run this command again with false

Additional useful info can be found at: https://superuser.com/questions/1397683/how-can-i-configure-syncthing-from-command-line-to-share-a-folder-with-another-c/1731999#1731999?s=0744928a5f9d4717b7445d039785ba53.

Don't waste your time with this repo, as it hasn't been updated since 2014, it is not working: https://github.com/classicsc/syncthingmanager

This repo https://github.com/tenox7/stc is useful but it doesn't not offer adding devices/folders.

Thank you for putting this together!

one snag,

$ syncthing generate
syncthing: error: unexpected argument generate
$ syncthing cli generate
No help topic for 'generate'

perhaps this step is no longer necessary? on my Ubuntu machine, I was able to start Syncthing v1.18.0-ds1 for the first time with just

# systemctl enable syncthing@MYUSERNAME
# systemctl start syncthing@MYUSERNAME

Instead of auto-accepting the request (which means ST will guess the desired folder name), one can also, on machine B, create a folder with the same $FOLDER_ID as the one on machine A, and then add machine A via its $DEVICE_ID_A to this folder.

The two (symmetric) requests will find each other and the pending requests will be satisfied.