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!

With a lot of media files the sync_media table grows in size quickly. You can save space using column compression using the following steps while using MariaDB:

1. Stop tubesync
2. Execute ALTER TABLE sync_media MODIFY metadata LONGTEXT COMPRESSED; on database tubesync
3. Start tunesync and confirm the connection still works.

If you're using Docker Compose and simply want to connect to another container with the DB for the performance benefits, a configuration like this would be enough:

 tubesync-db:
  image: postgres:15.2
  container_name: tubesync-db
  restart: unless-stopped
  volumes:
   - /<path/to>/init.sql:/docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/init.sql
   - /<path/to>/tubesync-db:/var/lib/postgresql/data
  environment:
   - POSTGRES_USER=postgres
   - POSTGRES_PASSWORD=testpassword

 tubesync:
  image: ghcr.io/meeb/tubesync:latest
  container_name: tubesync
  restart: unless-stopped
  ports:
   - 4848:4848
  volumes:
   - /<path/to>/tubesync/config:/config
   - /<path/to>/YouTube:/downloads
  environment:
   - DATABASE_CONNECTION=postgresql://postgres:testpassword@tubesync-db:5432/tubesync
  depends_on:
   - tubesync-db

Note that an init.sql file is needed to initialize the tubesync database before it can be written to. This file should contain:

CREATE DATABASE tubesync;

Then it must be mapped to /docker-entrypoint-initdb.d/init.sql for it to be executed on first startup of the container. See the tubesync-db volume mapping above for how to do this.