Share File

This is my contribution to XKCD #949.

The role model

There exists a web service called FileTea, which is reallly great: Just go there with your web browser and share a file. You get a link that you can send to other people, and they can use it to download the file. The greatness of FileTea comes from the fact that

• the file is streamed to the other user directly from your browser, i.e. it is not stored on the server, and
• as soon as you close your browser tab, the link becomes invalid.

The idea

The disadvantage of FileTea is that you need to open a browser tab and find the file in a file open dialogue. Annoying if you were just working with the file on the command line.

Therefore I have created a small python script, share-file, which

• takes a hostname and a number of filenames as command line arguments,
• uses ssh’s port forwarding feature to listen on a random port on the remote host,
• shows you a link to share and
• serves the files using a simply embedded web server to whoever opens that link.

For further clarification, here are some screenshots:

Screenshots

Installation

• git clone git://git.nomeata.de/share-file.git
• Put or link share-file somewhere in your PATH (or call it with its full path).
• Optionally: Install python-magic.

Bugs, warts and TODOs

• The server needs to have GatewayPorts clientspecified enabled in sshd_config. This could be fixed by not using SSH’s port-forwarding, but by uploading some code via SSH that opens the port and multiplexes the communication. But that would either require some non-standard libraries or lots of code.
• If the hostname you use to access the server via SSH is not publicly usable, you will have to manually change it before sharing the URL.
• The script has no hard dependencies (python comes with almost all that is needed), but if you want the browser to receive correct Content-Type headers, e.g. to display an image directly, install python-magic.
• If the randomly chosen port is not available on either the remote or the local host, the script will fail. Just try again.
• The embedded web server is rather dumb, it will not support resuming downloads, for example. A more fancy web server could be embedded, but that would add dependenies.
• The HTML output of the file index is plain and ugly; patches welcome.
• I would not need this if FileTea had a command line client.
• More problems? Please report them at the github issue tracker.

Author

© 2013 Joachim Breitner.