Collections not being synced to/from cloud

[kitgrose]

Expected Behavior

Cloud-synced projects should match on each machine logged in with the same account, or a sync error should be shown if there's something wrong.

Actual Behavior

All my cloud projects are shown as empty on both Mac and Windows machines (except on the machine where the project was created).

Reproduction Steps

Upgrade to Insomnia 8. Set up GitHub authentication and cloud sync. All my (previously local) collections are now in a project named "Insomnia" under the workspace "Personal workspace". The project type is shown as "Secure Cloud" in the project settings.

On my other Mac or Windows machines, I see multiple copies of the "Insomnia" project, but none have any contents.

Attempts to change the project name (to see if syncing is working at all) aren't reflected on other computers.

I next manually exported the collections for that project to a JSON file and transferred them to the new machine. I created a new project on that machine and imported the collections (which worked). All machines see the new project, but it still appears empty.

The dashboard on the Insomnia website shows 11 projects, 29 files and 1 collaborator, but when logging in on my other Mac, I see the 11 projects, but none contain any files.

I have tried deleting the contents of the ~/Application Support/Insomnia folder, and neither of the logs in the ~/Logs/Insomnia folder show any errors.

Is there an existing issue for this?

• [X] I have searched the issue tracker for this problem.

Additional Information

As far as I can tell, there's no way to trigger a sync inside the UI itself, so I have no idea if a sync is being performed (I've been restarting Insomnia to try to trigger a forced download). It would be really helpful to see some visual indication that syncing has been performed, and a "Sync now" or "Refresh" function somewhere to trigger an attempted cloud sync.

Insomnia Version

8.4.2

What operating system are you using?

macOS

Operating System Version

macOS Sonoma 14.1.1 (23B81) and Windows 11 v22H2 (Build 22621.2428)

Installation method

Download from Insomnia.rest website

Last Known Working Insomnia version

As far as I can tell, cloud sync has never worked properly for me.

[gatzjames]

👋 Hi @kitgrose thanks for the issue. Can you provide a bit more context about how this happens? Do you use the 'Pull' dropdown on the project and not see any files to pull there?

[kitgrose]

I don't use that button typically, but when I try, I see "Nothing to pull" in the drop-down menu:

[gatzjames]

@kitgrose are your collections pushed to the remote? You can push your changes on a collection by using the sync menu like this:

Once your collections are pushed to the remote you should be able to see them in the Pull menu on any other machine you are connected.

Let me know if that's not the case to investigate this further.

[kitgrose]

No, I hadn't even noticed that!

So just to be clear, to get the syncing behaviour working I need to manually go through all 26 collections and manually commit my files for each, then on each other computer I should pull them down manually if I know the information has changed?

If that's the intended behaviour I fundamentally misunderstood the way the new Insomnia works, sorry! I'm still a bit confused as to why the online dashboard would show the correct number of collections if I hadn't committed them, though?

[Elijer]

I'm not sure if this is the correct issue, but when using the pull button I had the following issue.

For collections that I imported from a json file, they didn't show up on other machines as pull options. However, when I duplicated them, then they did.

[cbyem40]

@Elijer Thanks for the tip, it helps. I encountered the same issue, unable to get the synced collection after push. After exported the original collection and imported again, it started to sync.

[subnetmarco]

@Elijer Thanks for the tip, it helps. I encountered the same issue, unable to get the synced collection after push. After exported the original collection and imported again, it started to sync.

@marckong @gatzjames why would this happen?

[thegurf]

I ran into a similar issue. There seems to be no option to commit changes from Windows (latest version):

I can commit from Linux and pull to windows, so sync is currently one-way only.

[ManfredLange]

So, if I understand this correctly, the so-called "cloud sync" of Insomnia is essentially broken?

This is what I tried: Install on Windows and on Linux. On both I can see the "Personal Workspace". I create a collection on one device, then expect it to see it on the other. That doesn't happen, though.

What am I missing? I can't find anything in the settings/preferences/etc. that helps me understand what goes where.

Given the experience so far with the free version, I have no intentions to spend money unless there is a suitable confidence level that the paid-for version works. At the moment I don't have that confidence.

[subnetmarco]

@ManfredLange thanks for the feedback. Today Cloud Sync follows a Git-like model (pushes, pulls and branching) in such a way that a change needs to be pushed, so that it can be pulled from another device/client. You can execute these operations from this section within a resource (like a collection):

Do you confirm that it works if you do this? We are also going to introduce auto syncing so that it simply updates your client with the latest change, and automatically pushes the changes.