note Note
This page contains sections that apply to the current edge release, it is not part of an official release yet.

SilverBullet is an offline-first web application. Therefore it keeps a copy of your space locally in your browser. It implements a sync engine to continuously keep this local copy in sync with the server (for technical details, see Architecture).

Sync happens:

• For the entire space: roughly every 20 seconds
• For the currently open file: every 4-5 seconds

In addition, you can use the ${widgets.commandButton "Sync: Space"} and ${widgets.commandButton "Sync: File"} commands to trigger these manually.

Sync runs in a service worker and therefore only runs when the service worker is active. The service worker is automatically kept active for as long as you have a SilverBullet tab or window open. Some browsers slow web apps down when they are in the background or not in an active tab. This may also affect whether sync happens in the background. Most browsers (including mobile ones), keep service workers running for a little while (perhaps up to a minute), even when e.g. the screen is locked, or another app is activated.

Status

If sync takes longer than a second, a black circle progress indicator will appear in the Top Bar.

Conflicts

When you use multiple clients and make changes to the same files simultaneously conflicts may happen. SilverBullet will not attempt to try to merge these conflicts, but rather create a conflicting copy when this happens. You will be notified in the UI when this occurs.

Configuration

You can tweak what files are synced locally via a few config.* configuration options.

note Note
Sync related configuration need to be done in the CONFIG page specifically. If they are configured elsewhere they will not be picked up.

By default all your pages are synced, but Documents are not. They are fetched on demand. If you would also like to sync documents (so you can access them when offline), you can do so by setting the following in a Space Lua block in CONFIG:

   

config.set("sync.documents", true)

In addition, you can fine-tune what files you do not want to sync using gitignore syntax assigned to the sync.ignore option, which accepts either a single string, or a list of strings:

   

config.set("sync.ignore", {
  -- Don't sync PDFs and MP4 files
  "*.pdf",
  "*.mp4"
})

After making changes to these options, you need to reload your client and wait for a sync cycle to kick in until they are applied.