filebox

README

Filebox

Filebox is a simple solution to the problem of "how do I get this file from my phone to my laptop?" The traditional solution is to email the file to yourself, but then you're just using the email server as a file server, and requires access to your email.

I wrote this as an alternative to my scp <file> rpi:/home/share/serve/ with a simple python http client serving static files out of that directory.

This means that there are a few core project requirements:

• Lightweight. Keep it simple, browsers are really fast if they don't have to parse megabytes of Javascript.
• Simple workflow. No complex OAuth2 login workflows, no navigating a million different menus, just click upload.

Obviously we still need some kind of authentication, but serving HTTP basic passwords over an encrypted connection is good enough. Since the user and hoster are one and the same, there's no point in complex E2E encryption protocols, validation mechanisms, etc. If you willingly brick your own webapp then that's your problem.

There's a small extension to core functionality that allows the generation of download links to specific files. This is my solution to email file size limits; instead of complicated GDrive/Dropbox workflows just click a button and share that link instead.

Why a self-hosted solution?

Security and privacy. I know that services like filebin exist, but for sensitive data there is no greater assurance of security than something I host and wrote myself.

The codebase is intentionally kept small and compact to aid in auditing that it says what it does on the label (not because I'm lazy I swear).

Other users

In service of the "file too big for email" use case, I'm considering some kind of feature where a third party may upload to the same instance so I may receive big files from other people who do not host their own servers.

This would require the implementation of:

• Input validation
• Authentication for secondary users
• Auth control for the above (generation of temporary passwords, timeouts)
• Access control for secondary users

The feature set is a little too big at this time to implement, but the app is designed with expansion for this in mind.

Installation and deployment

git clone https://github.com/IsaacKhor/filebox.git
cd filebox
mkdir files
echo '[]' > files/filesdb.json
vim config.json # Set the variables up
go build
./filebox

I highly recommend deploying this with cloudflare tunnels (I get enterprise features for free by working there, but tunnels are free for everyone). This greatly simplifies deployment by not needing to do things like setting up encryption, provisioning certificates, etc.

The config is simple:

ingress:
  - hostname: filebox.isaackhor.com
    service: http://localhost:7001
  <... other routes ...>

Configuration

DbPath:     path to json file containing details about uploaded files
FilesPath:  directory to store files
Port:       port to host the server
Host:       the HTTP host that incoming requests should have