dataserver

Indeed. It seems there are multiple questions in these comments on this subject, so I’ll just copy my reply from the Zotero 7 release here, since I don’t think anything has meaningfully changed since then: WebDAV support is nice to save money, but from a privacy perspective it’s a huge bummer that the sync servers get all your citation metadata. A better self-hosting story¹ is one path to resolving this. End-to-end encryption² similar to e.g. Firefox Sync is another. Zotero has a security overview³ that shows they clearly care about good practices, but it’s still bothersome to have to trust the server when many other applications have proven E2EE works great even for non-technical users⁴. Unfortunately from the main Zotero dev’s responses, it seems clear that they have no incentive to implement either and probably never will (look, the sa

> For example, I recently looked into self hosting Zotero. It is so under documented and complex that there is almost no way one could self host that (even for just one user) without that being ones job. So one needs to make a distinction between something being open source and being feasible to use/maintain Just for the benefit for anyone that want to go through this rabbit hole. You cannot selfhost Zotero. In theory but in practice it is no feasible. If you find their free storage limiting then store them on webdav (all clients support that). zotero team explicity said that they don't see this as a priority [1] and with the release of zotero 7 and transition it is not realistic to think they will ever do. [1] https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105#issuecomment...

WebDAV support is nice to save money, but from a privacy perspective it’s a huge bummer that the sync servers get all your citation metadata. A better self-hosting story¹ is one path to resolving this. End-to-end encryption² similar to e.g. Firefox Sync is another. Zotero has a security overview³ that shows they clearly care about good practices, but it’s still bothersome to have to trust the server when many other applications have proven E2EE works great even for non-technical users⁴. Unfortunately from the main Zotero dev’s responses, it seems clear that they have no incentive to implement either and probably never will (look, the same comment from 2½ years ago⁵) without some shift in circumstances (massive increase in funding, new regulatory requirements). Even if a community member implemented the entirety of either solution, dstillm

For the attachments like pdf you can use webdav, but for the metadata you have to use their service [1]. They have the code repos online so it's open source, but no self-hosting instructions [2]. They claimed it to be due to technical difficulties [3], though imo they have no incentives to provide this given that they host a paid service themselves. [1]: https://www.zotero.org/support/sync [2]: https://github.com/zotero/dataserver [3]: https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105

See my comments on [1] for why we don't support self-hosting. Short version: it would pretty much just be an entirely different project. > Syncing that to Zotero servers is kind of like giving back? I always thought that data might help improve Zotero's own auto-fill functionalities, which I'd like helping with. No, we don't expose your data to anyone else. (And tools that try to do that usually just end up filling people's libraries with junk data.) You should sync Zotero if you want to 1) access your library on other devices, 2) collaborate with others, and/or 3) have a real-time backup of your Zotero data. [1] https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105

What I (and believe many others) really want is a self-hosted Zotero server. See question has been asked: https://forums.zotero.org/discussion/73721/zotero-self-hoste... https://www.reddit.com/r/zotero/comments/d270kv/zotero_datas... https://github.com/zotero/dataserver/issues/105 https://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/48335/foss-... https://groups.google.com/g/zotero-dev/c/9FdSz0kIG_4?pli=1 Unfortunately, there is no officially supported way to do this. The official dataserver package does not have an instruction: https://github.com/zotero/dataserver There is an unofficial package from 5 years ago https://hub.docker.com/r/facciolo/zotero_dataserver-docker

The site is not very clear about if it's possible to self host the server part, but hopefully the server is the PHP application at https://github.com/zotero/dataserver