Unison is a powerful utility used to synchronize files and directories between systems.

These instructions are meant for Ubuntu and your experience on other systems may differ (installation process on Linux should be the same as long as you get the correct binary).
This works with WSL as the client.

Basic installation

Do this on both the client and the server

Get the latest release from the git repository, download it, and extract it.

cd /tmp
wget https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison/releases/download/v2.53.3/unison-2.53.3-ubuntu-x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xf unison-2.53.3-ubuntu-x86_64.tar.gz --one-top-level=unison
cd unison

Move the binary into /usr/bin root permissions are required

sudo mv bin/unison /usr/bin

Check that everything installed correctly.
This should return the version of unison you downloaded

unison -version

Example response:

$ unison version 2.53.3 (ocaml 4.14.1)

Generating SSH keys

Run this on the client

I recommend creating a key specifically for unison.
Note: Replace “[email protected]” with the user and ip of the server

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 8192 -o -a 1000 -f ~/.ssh/unison_key
ssh-copy-id -i ~/.ssh/unison_key.pub  [email protected]

Use Unison!

Everything should be ready to go. Execute the unison command on the client to begin syncing files to your server.
Note: if your server uses a non-standard ssh port (not 22), add -p 1234 to the sshargs parameter in the command with 1234 being whatever your port is. Note 2: Replace “[email protected]” with the user and ip of the server

unison -sshargs='-i ~/.ssh/unison_key' -auto -batch /path/to/local/directory ssh://[email protected]//path/to/target/directory