Upchud

File upload service; without stage 4 retardation.

Shilling points 🚀:

• Minimal dependencies
• CLI friendly
• Web friendly
• Easy to configure
• Optional random upload name mangling
• Optional Hash based deduping
• Small and clean codebase
• Traubisoda

Depedencies

• Lighttpd
• Tcl (base installation)
• Tcllib (only required when $::labeling_scheme is configured to hash)

Architecture

                                                  || Storage ||
             +-----------+       +------------+   || ~~~~~~~ ||  +---------+
Clinet ----> | Arbitrary | ====> | CGI script | --|| XXXXXXX ||--| Cleaner |
             |  Server   |       +------------+   || XXXXXXX ||  +---------+
             +-----------+                        || XXXXXXX ||

Any webserver that supports CGI/fastCGI will work. Lighttpd is recommended, but nginx was tested too.

The script does its thing.

To keep your uploads clean, you either have to enable clobbering in the script or deploy some sort of dedicated cleaner.

The simplest form of cleaner is a cron job that deletes files too old.

Files

File	Description
lighttpd.conf	Master lighttpd configuration. Tip: set max upload size here.
upchud.tcl	Master CGI Tcl script. Tip: simply forked by lighttpd; set finer configurations here.
Makefile	Short-hands for common operations.
cleaner.crontab	Simple cleaner job.
test/*	Scripts and files used during development.
example_frontend.html	Simple web front-end for the service.
example_frontend.lighttpd.conf	Serves the example front-end. Tip: you could merge this with the master configuration if you wanted one service.
nginx.conf	Example nginx configuration snippet.

Usage

Lets get hello-world out-of the way:

$ make serve &
[1] 15225
lighttpd -D -f lighttpd.conf
$ curl http://localhost:8080 --upload-file test/test.txt
http://localhost:8080/out//n6cru4.txt
$ curl http://localhost:8080/out//n6cru4.txt
Hello World

Alternatively I could run.

$ make serve &
[1] 23895
lighttpd -D -f lighttpd.conf
$ make front &
[2] 24105
lighttpd -D -f example_frontend.lighttpd.conf

And I could use the web page (localhost:8081 by default) to perform the same task.

The example frontend is perfectly functional, but is meant to be modified. Alternatively, you could copy and embed it anywhere else on your site at large.

To learn more about configuration, read the top of upchud.tcl and checkout lighttpd.conf.

For the mentally Polish, nginx.conf is provided, which is the snippet that was used for the main deployment of upchud.

Note

You will have to edit the paths because nginx is shit.

Why?

Because every implementation of this extremely simple thing is flawed. Common faults I witnessed are:

• CLI is second class with sloppy wrapper scripts and or HTML responses
• No web support, preventing phoneposting
• Horrifically convoluted configuration due to poor isolation of responsibilities
• 6 gorillion dependencies