Nimbus

Nimbus is a private file sharer and URL shortener. Heavily inspired by Cloudapp, Nimbus is a free and open source solution to file sharing and URL shortening that you can host yourself and fully control.

Nimbus consists of several components:

• A website that displays sharing pages for generated links and redirects shortened URLs to their targets
• A website to manage shared items
• An API to manipulate shared items
• A Mac OS X menubar app to upload files and shorten links

The menubar app is only compatible with OS X 10.9 and up since it is written in Swift. The files are stored in Amazon S3, so you must have an AWS account.

##Screenshots

##Features

• Share pages that show file previews or redirect to the shortened link
  • Image file previews
  • Text file previews with automatic syntax highlighting if applicable
• Screenshots are automatically uploaded and the share link is copied to the clipboard
• Drag a file or text to the menubar icon to upload it and copy the share link to the clipboard
• Drag a URL to the menubar icon to create a shortened link and copy it to the clipboard
• Keep track of view counts for files and shortened URLS

##Setup

To set up the Django app, perform the following steps on your server (assumes pip, virtualenv, and MySQL are already installed)

1. Create a virtualenv and activate it

2. Clone the repository (from here on, it is assumed that the respository's location is /usr/local/www/Nimbus)

3. While in the repository root, install the Python requirements by running

   pip install -r requirements/production.txt

4. Create a database and grant a user full access to it.

5. Follow the instructions in nimbus/settings/secret.sample.py to create a secrets file with your MySQL and Amazon S3 credentials

6. Set up the environment for the Django app by running

   export PRODUCTION=TRUE

7. Set up the database and create your user by running ./manage.py syncdb

8. Start a Django shell (./manage.py shell) and run the following commands, replacing example.com with your domain name

   from django.contrib.sites.models import Site
   Site.objects.update(name="example.com", domain="example.com")

9. Collect static files by running

   yes yes | ./manage.py collectstatic

###Serving Nimbus

Make sure you have a domain name configured with the following records:

@       IN A  <IP address of your server>
api     CNAME @
account CNAME @
files   CNAME files.<your domain name>.s3.amazonaws.com.

Also make sure you have an Amazon S3 bucket called files.<your domain name>

The recommended setup for serving Nimbus is Gunicorn managed by Supervisor with nginx as a reverse proxy. Configuration requirements are as follows.

• Nginx must be listening on the subdomains account and api of your domain as well as the root domain. Forward all of this traffic to Gunicorn - the Django app handles the subdomain routing.
• The attribute client_max_body_size must be set in the nginx config to a sufficiently large value to allow uploads of big files.
• Static file requests (/static/) should be aliased to nimbus/collected_static in the repository root
• Supervisor must call the version of gunicorn in your virtualenv

####Example Supervisor Configuration

[program:nimbus]
directory = /usr/local/www/Nimbus
user = nobody
command = /usr/local/virtualenvs/Nimbus/bin/gunicorn nimbus.wsgi:application --user=nobody --workers=1 --bind=127.0.0.1:8080
environment = PRODUCTION=TRUE
stdout_logfile = /var/log/sites/nimbus.gunicorn.log
stderr_logfile = /var/log/sites/nimbus.gunicorn.log
autostart = true
autorestart = true

####Example Nginx Configuration

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com account.example.com api.example.com;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name example.com account.example.com api.example.com;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /usr/local/certs/example.com.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /usr/local/certs/example.com.key;

    client_max_body_size 1024M;

    access_log /var/log/sites/nimbus.access.log;
    error_log /var/log/sites/nimbus.error.log;

    location /favicon.ico {
        alias /usr/local/www/Nimbus/nimbus/static/img/favicon.ico;
    }

    location /static/ {
        alias /usr/local/www/Nimbus/nimbus/collected_static/;
    }

    location / {
        rewrite ^/((?!(api-auth|admin))(.*))/$ /$1 permanent;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

##API Reference API documentation can be found here.

Contact

Ethan Lowman

• https://github.com/ethanal
• ethan@ethanlowman.com