NOTE: Active development has moved to https://github.com/espebra/filebin2. This repository is kept as an archive.

Filebin is a web application that facilitates convenient file sharing on the web. It was the software used at https://filebin.net earlier.

• Features
• Requirements
• Installation
• Configuration
• Web interface
• Web service
• Development
• TODO

• Responsive and mobile friendly web interface.
• All functionality available through an HTTP API.
• Upload files using drag and drop, select files from a dialog box or use cURL (examples below)
• Large file support. 30 GB file upload has been tested, but it should work fine with larger files as well.
• Archive (tar and zip) download to make it easy to download multiple files in one go.
• Files expire automatically after a configurable period of time.
• Files and entire bins can be deleted manually.
• Thumbnails are displayed for image files.
• Album view is available in bins with images. Images are sorted based on the Exif DateTime timestamps.
• Triggers are capable of calling external scripts on certain events. One potential use case is to notify virus/malware scanners on file upload.
• No external dependencies once built.
• Cache invalidation support.

To build Filebin, a Golang build environment (Go version 1.13 or higher) and some Golang packages are needed. The build procedure will produce a statically linked binary that doesn't require any external dependencies to run. It even comes with its own web server bundled.

The build process requires quite a bit of memory to complete successfully. Rough experiments show that up to 4 GB of memory is needed. At runtime, though, the memory requirements are modest. It seems that with the more memory requirements have droppet with recent releases of Go.

It is recommended but not required to run it behind a TLS/SSL proxy such as Hitch and web cache such as Varnish Cache. Example configurations for these are provided.

Install Golang:

$ sudo yum/apt-get/brew install golang

Last verified with Go 1.13.

Create the Go workspace and set the GOPATH environment variable:

$ mkdir ${HOME}/go
$ cd ${HOME}/go
$ mkdir src bin pkg
$ export GOPATH="${HOME}/go"
$ export PATH="${PATH}:${GOPATH}/bin"

Download and install Filebin:

$ go get -d github.com/espebra/filebin
$ cd ${GOPATH}/src/github.com/espebra/filebin
$ make get-deps
$ make install

The binary is created as ${GOPATH}/bin/filebin, which can be executed immediately. The --version argument prints the build time and the git commit hash used in the build.

$ ${GOPATH}/bin/filebin --version
Git Commit Hash: 40bd401ec350c86a46cdb3dc87f6b70c3c0b796b
UTC Build Time: 2015-11-11 23:01:35

Create the directories to use for storing files and temporary files:

$ mkdir ~/filebin ~/filebin/files ~/filebin/temp

Configuration is done using command line arguments when starting filebin. The built in help text will show the various arguments available:

$ ${GOPATH}/bin/filebin --help

Some arguments commonly used to start filebin are:

$ ${GOPATH}/bin/filebin \
  --host 0.0.0.0 --port 31337
  --baseurl http://api.example.com:31337
  --filedir ~/filebin/files \
  --tempdir ~/filebin/temp \
  --expiration 604800 \
  --cache-invalidation \
  --admin-username admin \
  --admin-password changeme \
  --client-address-header x-client \
  --access-log /var/log/filebin/access.log \
  [...]

By default it will listen on 127.0.0.1:31337.

The following are elaborations on some of the command line arguments.

The --baseurl parameter is used when building HATEOAS links in the JSON responses and to generate the correct hyperlinks in the HTML responses. If --baseurl is wrong, the required css and javascript resources will not load properly.

An example when having a TLS/SSL proxy in front on port 443 would be --baseurl https://filebin.example.com.

It is also possible to run filebin from a subdirectory if specifying this accordingly with for example --baseurl https://www.example.com/filebin.

A trailing slash is not needed.

Bins expire after some time of inactivity. By default, bins will expire 3 months after the most recent file was uploaded. It is not possible to download files or upload more files to bins that are expired.

--expiration 86400 will expire bins 24 hours after the last file has been uploaded.

To limit abuse it can be necessary to reject certain content-types. The --filter option can be applied multiple times in order to filter on multiple content-types. The filters are considered for each file upload using a sub string match on the content-type that is detected by the uploaded file.

--filter text/html fill reject file uploads matching the content-type text/html, including text/html; charset=utf-8.

--filter text/html --filter image fill reject file uploads matching the content-type text/html and all image files such as image/jpeg and image/png.

Enabled with the parameter --cache-invalidation. When enabled, HTTP PURGE requests will be sent to baseurl/path for every change to ensure content is invalidated on any frontend web cache.

The parameter --client-address-header can specify a request header to read the original client IP address from. This might be useful if having one or more proxies on layer 7 in front of the filebin daemon.

The parameters --admin-username and --admin-password will, if set, enable the administrator page. It is available at the URL baseurl/admin, with the specified username and password for login.

The parameter --access-log is used to set a full path for the access log. The access log is written in the Combined Log Format.

The parameter --hot-linking is enabled by default and allows hot linking of files. Hot linking is convenient sice it allows easy and direct access to files from other computers, but it also makes it easy to abuse the service. Starting Filebin with --hot-linking=false is a compromise that enables hot linking using tokens that are valid only for a short period of time.

Triggers enable external scripts to be executed at certain events.

The parameter --trigger-new-bin <command> makes sure <command> <bin> is executed whenever a new bin is being created. The execution is non-blocking. Example:

--trigger-new-bin /usr/local/bin/new-bin will execute /usr/local/bin/new-bin <binid>.

The parameter --trigger-upload-file <command> makes sure <command> <bin> <filename> is executed whenever a new file is uploaded. The execution is non-blocking. Example:

--trigger-upload-file /usr/local/bin/upload-file will execute /usr/local/bin/upload-file <binid> <filename>.

The parameter --trigger-download-bin <command> makes sure <command> <bin> is executed whenever a bin is downloaded as an archive. The execution is non-blocking. Example:

--trigger-download-bin /usr/local/bin/download-bin will execute /usr/local/bin/download-bin <binid>.

The parameter --trigger-download-file <command> makes sure <command> <bin> <filename> is executed whenever a file is downloaded. The execution is non-blocking. Example:

--trigger-download-file /usr/local/bin/download-file will execute /usr/local/bin/download-file <binid> <filename>.

The parameter --trigger-delete-bin <command> makes sure <command> <bin> is executed whenever a bin is deleted. The execution is non-blocking. Example:

--trigger-delete-bin /usr/local/bin/delete-bin will execute /usr/local/bin/delete-bin <binid>.

The parameter --trigger-delete-file <command> makes sure <command> <bin> <filename> is executed whenever a file is deleted. The execution is non-blocking. Example:

--trigger-delete-file /usr/local/bin/delete-file will execute /usr/local/bin/delete-file <binid> <filename>.

In all examples, the local file /path/to/some file will be uploaded.

Using the following command, the bin will be automatically generated and the filename of the uploaded file will be myfilename:

$ curl --data-binary "@/path/to/some file" -H "filename: myfilename" https://filebin.example.com/

Using the following command, bin will be set to custombin and filename will be set to myfile.

$ curl --data-binary "@/path/to/some file" https://filebin.example.com/ \
  -H "bin: custombin" -H "filename: myfile"

The following command will print a JSON structure showing which files that available in the bin custombin.

$ curl -H "Accept: application/json" https://filebin.example.com/custombin

The following commands will download the files in custombin as tar and zip archives:

# Tar
$ curl -o custombin.tar https://filebin.example.com/archive/custombin/tar

# Zip
$ curl -o custombin.zip https://filebin.example.com/archive/custombin/zip

Downloading a file is as easy as specifying the bin and the filename in the request URI:

$ curl https://filebin.example.com/custombin/myfile

Note that if hot linking is disabled, then a token is introduced as a query parameter that makes the URL non-deterministic. A side effect is that this makes it harder to use the API to download files.

$ curl -X DELETE https://filebin.example.com/custombin/myfile

Logs are written to stdout, and can easily be redirected to for example syslog when using the systemd service script provided.

Filebin does currently not use any other database than the filesystem itself.

There is a pre-commit hook available in the repository that will make sure that commited go source code is properly formatted. Enable it with a symlink:

$ ln -s tools/git/pre-commit .git/hooks/pre-commit

• Automatically clean up expired bins.
• Avoid reuse of expired bins.
• Trigger cache invalidation on bin expiration.