lightf

lightf is a lightweight, secure and transient fileserver written in Go.

The main use-case is a simple, but powerful private fileserver to share files with your friend or colleagues. It also ships with a small cli tool.

Features

• Authorization with tokens via a configuration file
  • Give access to specific friends with creating a token for them!
• Random names for uploaded files for security reasons
  • No more problems with counting IDs and people spying on your files!
• Allow only specific file types and sizes for specific access tokens
  • Maybe you want to share a token only for .png files? No problem!
• Expiration time for files
  • A must have. No chance for people saving the image id and downloading it later on.
• Additional cli tool for Unix based systems

Setup

Cli tool (optional)

First of all get your hands on the cli tool, as it will help creating secure tokens and uploading files. But of course, this tool is only optional, as you can create your own tokens as you like and upload files with curl for example.

Download the latest release on this Github page and unpack it to the folder of your liking.

Now copy the lightf binary to your bin folder and add execution permissions to it.

sudo cp ./lightf /usr/bin/lightf
sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/lightf

Try to execute

lightf --help

and you should see something like this in your terminal

If not, check if the binary folder you pasted the lightf file in is in your $PATH.

Server

Most important is the auth.yml and the storage directory. The auth.yml will be used for authentication, i.e. allowing requests to upload files and the storage directory contains the archive and the current files, where the uploaded files will be stored.

For auth.yml configuration, see below.

After that, simply execute the lightf-serv binary, which you previously unpacked.

sudo chmod +x ./lightf-serv
./lightf-serv

And the server should be available at the default address localhost:8081/upload, which you can test with curl via

curl -X POST http://localhost:8081/upload

If you get a response, the server should be up and running.

With Docker

With Docker, it is even more easy to setup the server. There is a prebuilt docker image available with the tag superioz/lightf:latest, which you can use.

Simply execute

docker run --rm superioz/lightf:latest

and you're good to go.

With Docker-Compose

To take a step further, there is also a preconfigured docker-compose.yml file.

version: "3"

services:
    lightf:
        image: lightf:0.2.16
        environment: 
            LIGHTF_GIN_PORT: 8081
            LIGHTF_AUTH_CONF: /etc/lightf
            LIGHTF_STORAGE: /var/lib/lightf/storage
            LIGHTF_STORAGE_ADDRESS: "http://127.0.0.1:8080/%s"
        ports:
            - "8081:8081"
        volumes:
            - "./auth.yml:/etc/lightf/auth.yml:ro"
            - "./storage:/var/lib/lightf/storage"
    serve:
        image: halverneus/static-file-server:v1.7.2
        environment: 
            PORT: 8080
            FOLDER: /var/www
            SHOW_LISTING: "false"
        ports:
            - "8080:8080"
        volumes:
            - "./storage/files:/var/www"

Notice, that there is a static file server as well. This is only to show, how easily you can add a file server in front of the uploaded files.
Btw: It is recommended to use HTTPS, but it is not neccessary.

Then simply run

docker-compose up

and bam, done.

Configuration

Cli Contexts

General

Authentication

Environment Variables