A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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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 :>
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.
Alright, you bought me with this
Amazing presentation and nice that you have a demo!
Sometimes I feel so new to setting up my own digital ecosystem because I look at a thing and think "that's so cool" but struggle to imagine it at home. So could someone help me understand.
This would be a replacement for something like Google Drive or Proton Drive? The actions I would use this for would be:
So I would spin this up on my NAS or my main PC and replace those services and accomplish those actions using this software?
Are there other services or actions I'm missing? Am I misunderstanding the premise entirely?
I think Copyparty would be great for that purpose. The only thing you're missing is a way to expose it to the internet, such as a public IP or some tunnel
Yep! Depending on what your home connection looks like, you have a few options:
if you are lucky enough to have your own private IP-address and are able to open ports, then you're almost done already -- you can put copyparty on some port (or keep the default 3923), and then anyone could connect to it by going to https://your.ip.address:3923/
(with this approach, you will want to create your own HTTPS certificate so the traffic is properly encrypted -- the best option here is to get a domain and get a certificate for the domain)
however, if you are behind CGNAT, meaning your internet provider has given you a shared IP-address, then people cannot connect directly to your home-PC. One way around that issue is by setting up a machine somewhere on the internet which bridges the gap back home to your PC. Cloudflare offers this as service, and this is explained in the copyparty readme -- see the "at home" section for one way to do that.
if you are against using Cloudflare for idealistic reasons (they are becoming quite powerful since they run a whole lot of the internet), then you can set up a cheap VPS which serves the same purpose. That's my setup, and how you are accessing the copyparty demo server right now -- I have the cheapest VPS you can get from Hetzner. The VPS is running nginx, and it forwards the traffic to my homeserver through an SSH tunnel. I haven't documented this approach in the copyparty readme, but I have a feeling a lot of other people have :>
Oh yea, copyparty could do that. I might just do that too. My issue is more how do I grant them access to my network to get the thing tough? I currently use wireguard profiles and lock down where they can reach with rules and shit on a firewalla on a per account basis but that’s really complex and inelegant. It works and would working copypasta, but I kind of wish there was a simple webUI where I could define what a WireGuard user should be able to reach on my network with simple checkboxes by rules I have created over time. Probably wouldn’t tie into firewalla nicely though it could be more likely with OPNsense.
Hmm. Surely someone must have thought of that already. It would make adopting things like copypasta much simpler and less risky.
Great job on something like this! I'll probably give it a whirl soon, I like Nextcloud but find it clunky sometimes because it's often a bit more than I need. Maybe breaking it up into Immich + this would help! Thank you for sharing your project!
One thing to note, your comparison against Nextcloud has a partially-incorrect point regarding file upload max size. The client does upload chunking, so is unaffected by the Cloudflare issue as well, but I believe the web client is still affected, just not the apps. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/big_file_upload_configuration.html#adjust-chunk-size-on-nextcloud-side
I suspect a few others may be as well, but I'm only familiar with the Nextcloud one because that's what I've been running, and discovered in making sure I could still upload video files recorded while out and about.
Also love that it looks like a simpler install!
Thanks for the correction; confirmed that Nextcloud now does chunked uploading (with the web-client too). Fixed :>
Good luck, and let me know if you hit any issues o/
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.
This is very impressive and I'm highly likely to give it a whirl. My question is, though: would it be something that my very non-tech savvy wife could use?
Eg. I'm thinking setup the app on her phone with a default location and when she asks me for a file I can just tell her that I've "put it in the app", and she'll be able to easily retrieve it. Also same thing but vice versa, though the video seems to cover that via the Android share menu...
Again, super impressive. Good job!
I have a hunch that the true answer, to be honest, is "no" -- at least with the current UI as it is. I've come to terms with not being the best at making intuitive user interfaces, so I went all-in on making it poweruser-friendly and efficiency instead.
Yeah, there's the android app for sending files to the server, and it'll always send files to the same folder, so that part should be pretty solid. But actually grabbing files from the server, perhaps not so much. Not sure I'd risk it, but I'll leave the decision to you hehe
I'm not aware of any user-friendly android/iOS apps for connecting to a webdav / ftps / sftp server, but if those exist, then that would probably have been a good option!
I have a samba fileserver behind wireguard. Would copyparty be an improvement over samba?
This looks sick. Thanks for making and sharing it!
Looks really cool. Might spin up a test bed to try.
I’m in the market for a self hosted file server so I can use it as a destination for website backups. Absolutely going to give this a look next week. Thanks for posting about it!
Looks fantastic, I'll actually be trying this. Love how it doesn't lock my files into some obscure format like seafiles.
OMG! I've been looking for something like this for quite some time!
I will try this as soon as I have time. Thank you!
This is really impressive
Any way to run the server as a docker container?
Yep -- https://github.com/9001/copyparty/tree/hovudstraum/scripts/docker
Hopefully that description makes sense (let me know if it doesn't)
You can run absolutely anything as a docker container that you have the binary (and other files if needed), or you can go fancy and compile from source in docker.
Just create a dockerfile.
From (some base image you want to use like Ubuntu or Alpine)
Copy necessary files
Run the binary
You can run it straight from command line, put it in a docker compose file, or even tag it and upload it to a repository (and then reference that in your docker compose)
Wow! This is great. I may give it a shot.
Hey! Just set this up today and it seems pretty good. Only issue I'm having is that is pretty slow to download (~2mb/s) what are some good ways to speed it up?
This looks nighsome as blossom!