What is b?

I got bored during 4th of July weekend, so a mini weekend hackathon to put something together.

In short:

1. file hosting, and
2. link shortening, and
3. pastebin

Project is inspired by https://github.com/raftario/filite. Actually, index.html is adopted from filite, because I'm too lazy to write a frontend.

Use cases

Quick file exchange with friends

If you want to exchange some files (say 50MB of photos from last week's trip) with a friend, one of you can use TryCloudflare, then run b with baseURL set to your tunnel, so the other person can quickly upload/download file.

All-in-One self-hosted solutions

If you want pastebin, bit.ly, and Firefox Send (roughly) all in the same spot, then b is perfect for you. You can even setup access control so POST requests can only come from your VPN, or requiring a password, so you can leave b running openly on the internet.

Promotion

Sometimes you just want to show off the shortest domain you own and let everyone knows 😂.

Configuration

Please see config.yaml for reference.

How to run

./bin/b.exe -config config.yaml

The default config.yaml should be sufficient for most use cases. Visit http://127.0.0.1:3000 to use the web interface.

Command Line usage

Uploading a file:

# Specifying an expiration time is in TODO.

curl -X PUT -F file=@Alaska.jpg https://example.com:3000/f-alaskan
{"result":"https://example.com:3000/f-alaskan","error":null,"messages":[]}

Pasting some text:

# Optionally, you can specify when the paste expires in seconds: https://example.com:3000/t-footxt/60

cat foo.txt | curl -X PUT --data-binary @- https://example.com:3000/t-footxt
{"result":"https://example.com:3000/t-footxt","error":null,"messages":[]}

Shortening a link:

# Optionally, you can specify when the link expires in seconds: https://example.com:3000/l-longurl/60

curl -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -X PUT \
    --data '{"url": "https://llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.co.uk/"}' \
    https://example.com:3000/l-longurl
{"result":"https://example.com:3000/l-longurl","error":null,"messages":[]}

TODO

In a future version it is planned to add:

1. S3/S3-compatible storage to back file hosting (done!)
2. *SQL and its garden varieties for link/text/file metadata (added SQLite for app.Backend, not app.FastBackend though)
3. Environmental variables based configurations (done via config.yaml)
4. Access control
5. TTL for file service
6. Anything you feel like you want to add. The interface exists in app/backend.go

How to develop locally

Requirements:

• Golang 1.16.5
• Docker & Docker-Compose
• Your favorite IDE

1. First, run docker-compose up -d
2. Then, ensure that the tests pass with go test -v -race ./...

Disclaimer: I mainly test on Windows, and Github Actions test on ubuntu. macOS is currently untested.

How to build

go build -tags sqlite_omit_load_extension,osusergo,netgo -ldflags="-s -w -linkmode external -extldflags -static" -o bin/b.exe ./cmd/b/

This will build b in bin/b.exe with stripped debug info, and statically without dynamically linked libs.

For building on macOS host (amd64/arm64), remove -extldflags -static.