Self-hosting Glom

Glom 1.3.5 has experimental support for self-hosting of its databases, so you should never again need to configure PosgreSQL.

It does this by starting its own PostgreSQL instance, supplying its own PostgreSQL configuration and data files, and connecting to it. Those files are stored in one directory, though I’d like to improve that directory structure. This vastly improves the user experience, so I expect this to bring a lot more users once I’ve shaken out the new bugs.

This should satisfy most people who were demanding support for SQLite instead of PostgreSQL. Unlike SQLite, this still allows you to share your database across the network with multiple users. Support for non-PostgreSQL external database servers is still possible, but that work is really not my priority.

I really do need to combine some of the dialogs. At the moment you see several dialogs, one after the other, to save a new file, choose a database name (and choose self-hosting or external hosting), then to connect or provide initial connection details.

glom_new_database_with_self_hosting

9 thoughts on “Self-hosting Glom

  1. Great news indeed. I’ve been watching glom for a long while now. I think it’s a very important app, and you’re right: This should make its adoption a lot easier to swallow for a lot of people. Can’t wait to find some time to test this out myself.

  2. So, hrm. Very cool :) But, shouldn’t it be possible to support both postgres and sqlite at the same time? e.g. via libgda or some other database abstraction layer? (libgda comes to mind for this. I haven’t actually checked what all it supports.)

    In any case, very cool, useful tool :)

  3. Heh. I just read the development page — libgda is listed right there. *blushes*

  4. Chris, feel free to work on that. There’s an open bug about it. But it gives nothing useful to most users and the choice would be a confusing distraction.
    I think it’s only conceivable use would be in embedded single-user environments.

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