notmuch over ssh

notmuch over ssh

[Keegan Carruthers-Smith]

Hello.

Thought I'd share a hack I've been using recently. I have my 
notmuch database on another machine. I wanted to access it via my 
local emacs session. I didn't want to ssh in to the machine or 
sync the data to another machine. I realised all communication is 
done via the notmuch binary, so I wrote a wrapper script which 
runs notmuch via ssh:

  #!/usr/bin/env bash  args=()  for var in "$@" do 
      args+=($(printf '%q' "$var")) 
  done  exec ssh real.local -- notmuch "${args[@]}" 

Note I have hardcoded the remote (real.local). I also needed to 
escape arguments since the remote shell had a tendancy to 
interpret them. This escaping isn't fullproof, but has been 
working so far.

I put the above script on my PATH as "notmuch", and emacs 
magically uses it. Alternatively you could set the notmuch-command 
to point to the above shell script.

Cheers,
Keegan

Re: notmuch over ssh

[Tomi Ollila]

On Wed, Feb 10 2021, Keegan Carruthers-Smith wrote:

> Hello.
>
> Thought I'd share a hack I've been using recently. I have my 
> notmuch database on another machine. I wanted to access it via my 
> local emacs session. I didn't want to ssh in to the machine or 
> sync the data to another machine. I realised all communication is 
> done via the notmuch binary, so I wrote a wrapper script which 
> runs notmuch via ssh:

Good stuff !

>
>   #!/usr/bin/env bash  args=()  for var in "$@" do 
>       args+=($(printf '%q' "$var")) 
>   done  exec ssh real.local -- notmuch "${args[@]}" 

In https://notmuchmail.org/remoteusage/

there is an alternative

!/bin/bash
printf -v ARGS "%q " "$@"
exec ssh notmuch notmuch ${ARGS}

(which fork(2)s zero times...)


And then there is my alternative at:

https://github.com/domo141/nottoomuch/blob/master/nottoomuch-remote.rst

(now that I posted that I have to check if it has rotted in last 4 years ;)


Tomi


>
> Note I have hardcoded the remote (real.local). I also needed to 
> escape arguments since the remote shell had a tendancy to 
> interpret them. This escaping isn't fullproof, but has been 
> working so far.
>
> I put the above script on my PATH as "notmuch", and emacs 
> magically uses it. Alternatively you could set the notmuch-command 
> to point to the above shell script.
>
> Cheers,
> Keegan

Re: notmuch over ssh

[Chris Coutinho]

On Wed, 2021-02-10 at 12:51 +0200, Tomi Ollila wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10 2021, Keegan Carruthers-Smith wrote:
> 
> > Hello.
> > 
> > Thought I'd share a hack I've been using recently. I have my 
> > notmuch database on another machine. I wanted to access it via my 
> > local emacs session. I didn't want to ssh in to the machine or 
> > sync the data to another machine. I realised all communication is 
> > done via the notmuch binary, so I wrote a wrapper script which 
> > runs notmuch via ssh:
> 
> Good stuff !
> 
> > 
> >   #!/usr/bin/env bash  args=()  for var in "$@" do 
> >       args+=($(printf '%q' "$var")) 
> >   done  exec ssh real.local -- notmuch "${args[@]}" 
> 
> In https://notmuchmail.org/remoteusage/
> 
> there is an alternative
> 
> !/bin/bash
> printf -v ARGS "%q " "$@"
> exec ssh notmuch notmuch ${ARGS}
> 
> (which fork(2)s zero times...)
> 
> 
> And then there is my alternative at:
> 
> https://github.com/domo141/nottoomuch/blob/master/nottoomuch-remote.rst
> 
> (now that I posted that I have to check if it has rotted in last 4 years ;)
> 
> 
> Tomi
> 
> 
> > 
> > Note I have hardcoded the remote (real.local). I also needed to 
> > escape arguments since the remote shell had a tendancy to 
> > interpret them. This escaping isn't fullproof, but has been 
> > working so far.
> > 
> > I put the above script on my PATH as "notmuch", and emacs 
> > magically uses it. Alternatively you could set the notmuch-command 
> > to point to the above shell script.
> > 
> > Cheers,
> > Keegan
> _______________________________________________
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> To unsubscribe send an email to notmuch-leave@notmuchmail.org

Have you tried mounting the notmuch database locally using something like sshfs?
I wonder if that's a safer option than all the string escaping you're doing
here.

On the other hand, your network connection would need to be fast enough to allow
this kind of access, and the notmuch versions installed on either machine need
to be compatible.

Chris\r