I made a video about copyparty, the selfhosted fileserver I’ve been making for the past 5 years.
The main focus of the video is the features, but it also touches upon configuration. Was hoping it would be easier to follow than the readme on github… not sure how well that went, but hey :D
This video is also available to watch on the copyparty demo server, as a high-quality AV1 file and a lower-quality h264.
Your readme looks super in depth, thanks for that! I haven’t watched the video yet but will later.
I didn’t see it mentioned from a quick glance, but is either sftp or ftps supported?
SFTP is not currently on the roadmap, but it’s not entirely implausible.
FTPS is supported, but it requires an optional dependency to be installed (pyopenssl), so it’s not available in the Windows EXE. And I just realized that the dependency is currently not present inside the docker images either, so I’ll get that fixed right away.
Clearly a labour of love 👍
Maybe support for some music streaming apps (subsonic?) would be cool?
That’s a neat idea – I’ve heard that a lot of stuff uses the subsonic API under the hood, so I’ll see what it would take to become compatible with that. At first glance it looks like I’d have to mine and index way more information about audio files, but could still be doable :>
Looking at and/or incorporating Navidrome might be helpful.
Oh my god, this seems really good and closer to what I want than anything yet. Been looking for something to replace Nextcloud and found nothing good so I might take a look at this.
I replaced nextCloud’s file sharing with Syncthing just recently, as I found myself only synchronising between two computers (one desktop, one smartphone) anyway. :-)
Just curious, why did you replace nextcloud? I’m looking into transitioning from my current file server, and I’ve mostly heard only good things and not NextCloud.
Nextcloud is like Windows 95, it works great when you install it then it just keeps getting slower as you fill it with content
I want something with a permission model that works the same when accessed over a network share (SMB, ideally NFS) and access over a web interface. Ideally it would have a Mac File Provider sync client and whatever the Windows equivalent is called as well.
Nextcloud is fine but it’s not that.
Hey fellow scener, cool project!
Just a few thoughts/questions:
- BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.
- Why have it be one huge python source file? This is a serious code smell imo, and something you really should avoid doing as this can be a major maintenance burden.
BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.
yeah that’s a good point, I’ll add an option to take advantage of this if you know you’re running on a filesystem where that works as intended.
Why have it be one huge python source file?
oh don’t worry, it’s all separate files during development – there’s a build-stage which bundles everything up into a single file for distribution. But thanks for the concern :D
Ah, so you have compiled it into one file? Didn’t know that was possible for python, what tool do you use for this?
sooo this is one of the things that started with someone saying “wouldn’t it be funny if…”
if you open copyparty-sfx.py in a text editor, you’ll see how – but please make sure to use an editor which is able to handle about 600 KiB of comments which contain invalid utf8 / binary garbage 😁
I ended up rolling my own packer since I wanted optimal encoding efficiency, and everything I could find would do stuff like base85 or ucs2 tricks, but it turns out python is perfectly happy with binary garbage in comments if you declare that the file is
latin-1so it realizes all hope is lost :Dthe only drawback of the sfx.py is that it needs to extract to $TEMP before running, so that’s the slight advantage of the zipapp (the .pyz alternative), but that suffers from some performance reduction in return, and is more hermetic (doesn’t let you swap out the bundled dependencies with fresh versions as easily if necessary)
Why not use zipapp?
What do you use to bundle into one file?
copyparty-sfx.pyis a custom packer (see this reply) created by make-sfx.sh, andcopyparty.pyzis a standard zipapp, created by make-pyz.sh. The zipapp has more disadvantages than thesfx.py, so that’s the default/recommended build.
I would probably remove python 2 support, it was end of life when the project was started.
As long as it’s not causing any issues or drawbacks for modern python versions (and it isn’t), I don’t see any reason to do that – on the contrary, I know people are running copyparty on retro equipment, so I’d very much prefer to keep it for as long as possible :>
I don’t think there is a Python 2 version for retro equipment (DOS?). ;-)
Just because something is EOL doesn’t make it useless.
So long as it’s known and managed, it’s fine.
This looks sick. Thanks for making and sharing it!
Can we have Gopher support?
I was thinking of that!! But then I realized that even Firefox removed gopher support by now, so the joke was dead on arrival :P
Firefox isn’t that great for FTP either. Gopher still exists :-) and I’d love to use it even more.
Put out some in-depth docker instructions and this will be common use in a month. Good work.
Yup, I tried to run the docker image with the suggested docker command and it errored out for lack of a config file (though it did offer a fix in the logs for mounting the current directory as read/write)
I bumped into copyparty the other month when looking for a software that could let me transfer files to a friend with the ability to pause/resume. Didn’t bother with it, tried another software instead. Never really got it to work so I gave up on it.
Bumped into the YouTube video today, decided to give copyparty a shot, damn sir you’ve written a fine piece of software. It’s so easy to get up and configure. The UI is a bit janky, but charming at the same time. Thanks for all the hard work!
I’m properly in awe at this project. Not only does it support a wide range of protocols and runs practically everywhere, but it can play audio, video, display images and has keyboard shortcut support ???
It’s got everything I could think about and so much more.
I can’t wait to try it out !
Thank you so much for your time and for making this open source.
Thanks a lot for the kind words! ready to answer questions if you hit any bumps :>
This looks great but I really wish it had SFTP.
thanks for the vote, I hear ya :>
You made this on your phone on the bus ride to and from work.
I cleaned the cat box yesterday and considered that an accomplishment.
Fuck.
Congrats on the cat box cleaning!
Ho… Ly… Shit… This is great! The UI is a bit confusing at first but doesn’t take long to get what’s going on. I might even be disappointed with a UI revamp 😁 I can’t believe how much functionality this has. It’s already replacing some processes I have for mounting drives and backing up files. Maybe I missed something, but my only complaint would be the lack of an automatic one-way folder sync in the Party UP! app.
I’m blown away, great job!
you even mention ladybird as browser, nice 😎
it’s such an impressive project! Amazing what they’ve accomplished in so little time, and so important too – we need as many options as we can get.
I’ve been using copyparty for months, and it’s just been an absolute gem. and the fact there are even iOS shortcuts to upload things you stumble across while doomscrolling is just icing on top.
