Filebin is a web application that facilitates convenient file sharing over the web. This is the development branch of the next release that in the future will power http://filebin.net. It can be distributed as a statically linked binary without specific dependencies for easy installations.

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

To build Filebin, a Golang build environment 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.

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 available below.

Install Golang:

$ sudo yum/apt-get/brew install golang

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, logs and temporary files:

$ mkdir ~/filebin ~/filebin/files ~/filebin/logs ~/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
  [...]

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.

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

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

Triggers enable external scripts to be executed at certain events.

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

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

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

--trigger-uploaded-file /usr/local/bin/uploaded-file will execute /usr/local/bin/uploaded-file <tagid> <filename>.

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

Using the following command, the tag will be automatically generated and the filename will be set to the SHA256 checksum of the content. The checksum of the content will not be verified.

$ curl --data-binary "@/path/to/some file" http://localhost:31337/

Using the following command, tag will be set to customtag and filename will be set to myfile.

$ curl --data-binary "@/path/to/some file" http://localhost:31337/ \
  -H "tag: customtag" -H "filename: myfile"

Using the following command, filebin will verify the checksum of the uploaded file and discard the upload if the checksum does not match the specified checksum:

$ curl --data-binary "@/path/to/some file" http://localhost:31337/ \
  -H "tag: customtag" -H "filename: myfile" \
  -H "content-sha256: 82b5f1d5d38641752d6cbb4b80f3ccae502973f8b77f1c712bd68d5324e67e33"

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

$ curl http://localhost:31337/customtag

The following commands will download the files in customtag as a zip archive:

$ curl http://localhost:31337/customtag?o=zip
$ curl -H "content-type: application/zip" http://localhost:31337/customtag

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

$ curl http://localhost:31337/customtag/myfile

$ curl -X DELETE http://localhost:31337/customtag/myfile

All logs are written to stdout. They 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.

These are feature that would be nice to have:

• Automatically clean up expired tags.
• Avoid reuse of expired tags.
• Support for deleting entires tags.
• Support for deleting single files (already in the API).
• Streaming of entire (on the fly) compressed tags.
• Thumbnail generation.
• Image meta data (EXIF) extraction.
• Administrator dashboard.