Copyparty, the FOSS file server [video]

236 pointsposted 2 months ago
by franczesko

60 Comments

dmd

a month ago

Copyparty is an absolutely incredible tour-de-force and has an absolutely insane feature set.

But if you want something rock solid that probably solves your actual problem, I'd recommend looking at rclone - specifically the 'rclone serve webdav' command.

philips

a month ago

Features of copy party I use regularly:

Search to find epubs for my phone

OPDS to downloads things to koreader

Download file as zip to quickly grab an album from my collection to load to a device

Rclone is great but not exactly the same

venusenvy47

a month ago

I use rclone to give me command line access to Google Drive from Debian. What would be the use case for webdav via rclone? Usually a cloud service like this has a native way to perform file transfers from a browser.

dmd

a month ago

Mac, Windows, and most Linux desktops all support webdav for mounting folders.

That means you can mount, natively on your desktop, anything rclone supports.

cwillu

a month ago

AdmiralAsshat

a month ago

Good god, that's a long landing page. It's like they shoved the whole wiki into the readme.

jordemort

a month ago

This is actually my favorite style of documentation. Just hit me over the head with the whole thing, I can take it.

medstrom

a month ago

Plus, in my experience when I make a separate user manual... a lot fewer people read it.

yjftsjthsd-h

a month ago

Yes, but it starts with an overview, table of contents, and quickstart, so I see no downsides to that approach and lots of upsides.

vinnymac

a month ago

Most repositories try to create a poor man’s wiki inside of their README. It’s better this way until that problem is solved.

The other style I like is a single sentence with a single link to the actual wiki.

kanemcgrath

a month ago

I have been using copyparty since the last hn thread on it months ago. It is a masterpiece of "Just Works" Technology.

duckerduck

a month ago

What are you using it for?

chromehearts

a month ago

Me personally I use it to upload files (from my phone or sometimes other random devices) to a folder I call "void". "void" can be used by everyone to upload something but only I can read it. I also have some public pics, vids and music files here and there. It's so convenient & easy to handle, honestly a better alternative to other cloud providers in some ways in my opinion.

user

a month ago

[deleted]

spacedoutman

a month ago

This video is what got me into homelabbing, grabbed a n150 mini-pc and got jellyfin and the whole suite installed.

Tailscale + copyparty allowing seamless transfer of files between my phone and pc was the biggest qol i never knew i needed.

nickdichev

a month ago

I’f you’re using tailscale, what features does copy party give you that you can’t get with tailscale drop?

wrxd

a month ago

The most amazing thing is that this was coded on the author’s phone, on the bus, with Termux, Tmux and Vim.

tripflag

a month ago

Ah, a small correction regarding this... What I /meant/ to say in the video was that a lot of the INITIAL code was written this way, so the statement is mostly true for v0.2.3. Since then I've primarily been using vscodium (and recently zed) on my linux laptop, but I still tend to do quick prototyping on the phone when i get a bugreport or a sudden idea.

That part of the video was recorded at 3am as I just wanted to "get it done", which also explains the other mistakes (typos, phrasing). I tried to replace the audio-track of the video when i noticed the phonecoding part after uploading, but turns out that's not really possible, so I figured what's done is done, impractical as it is -- I've been trying to offer this correction when I see it come up.

So my workflow right now is mostly zed and pyright+black, and no AI/LLM except for localization of new strings to languages I don't speak.

idle_zealot

a month ago

Any reason you prefer zed to codium? I've been using codium with vim bindings for a while and am not really keeping up with the new hotness.

tripflag

a month ago

Microsoft has been making it harder to run their proprietary python plugin in vscodium, which I was relying on to provide hints from pyright. That's something I didn't want to deal with, so I just jumped ship.

There are some things I miss from codium, and I still capitulate back when editing files with nonstandard indentation because zed doesn't yet have autodetect for that, and also its git-staging / diff-view isn't as good yet, but aside from those it's a mostly alright experience.

gibsonsmog

a month ago

Copyparty has been one of my favorite home lab tools since it popped up. Way better than Samba, less hassle than NextCloud, seemingly has more features than FileBrowser and similar. The config can be a bit daunting, but once it clicks it's pretty reasonable.

Plus you can change the UI color scheme to Hotdog Stand, the palette that signals you're hardcore and know what you're doing.

surfingdino

a month ago

Brilliant. This reminds me of (but is way more advanced) a single-file Python NoSQL key-value DB that used pickling to store data. It was FAST. Can't remember what happened to it. Anybody?

john01dav

a month ago

I wrote something similiar (minimal nosql key-value DB) and it was less fast than (specifically lower throughput, I did not measure other metrics) Redis, despite some passing attempts to make it fast (like using async/await for all IO).

quixventure

a month ago

Like so many others, I saw the video the last time it was on hn and, again, like so many others, I went in thinking, what do I need this for and ended the video thinking... Ok, I gotta try this!

And I use it every day now...

I have been fighting annoying Samba issues with MacOS and a Linux NAS for years now, but CP just works. I can EASILY move files around and its really fast.

But the stuff that keeps me from going back to Dufs or FileBrowser are the music player and picture viewer... They.. Just work... No overhead, I can have a link that just starts playback with no extra fuss, it works really well for my use case.

I do not love the UI, but it works once you get used to it. I have a lot of pretty software that does the opposite for sure!

chromehearts

a month ago

I've been using it ever since it got really popular last july; it's super duper convenient. Especially when I am on a different device (work laptop; or something else, just anything), Whenever I need to upload my data somewhere to access it later I just upload it to my configured folder (which only admins can read; anonyms can only write). I also have some other folders publically visible for everyone with some pics & vids; (unreleased) music here and there

coolius

a month ago

i use copyparty on a home server, but the ui is really a pain to use (and ugly). it should be much more straightforward to copy/move/rename/delete files.

kingstnap

a month ago

The UI is terrible but AI is pretty good at messing with browser.js and the css file. I'm personally running it with a fair few spacing and layout tweaks to make stuff less janky and space wasting in galleries since the default margins are huge. Petty sure the layout shift scroll position stuff is gigabroken as well.

theoldgreybeard

a month ago

This is awesome software. Set it up as my home’s main file sharing server the last time it was posted here and it’s been great!

Moved all my family’s photos and videos out of the various clouds and now use this and it’s been great. Even my non tech savvy wife has gotten used to how it works and it works good for her. No complaints after the initial learning curve.

It’s not pretty but it does what it is supposed to do and it’s extremely easy to setup and configure.

philips

a month ago

I love the OPDS feature to serve ebooks to my families ereader devices. Many of the other OPDS servers are rather complex by comparison and as a bonus I can use it from a web browser for my devices that don’t speak OPDS.

https://github.com/9001/copyparty?tab=readme-ov-file#opds-fe...

tarsiel

a month ago

I’m curious, what devices do you have that support OPDS feeds? In the market for an ereader myself.

philips

a month ago

I put koreader on my families various devices. I have Inkpalm 5, Kindle 11th Gen, and an older Kindle. My favorite is the Inkpalm 5 but they stopped making it. :(

indigodaddy

a month ago

In the docs, copyparty says it’s made to work with native storage, but concedes that rclone+SFTP does work acceptably though still (I have a cheap SFTP/ssh/r sync etc only storage service so would put copyparty on a cheapo VPS and do rclone sftp).

Has anyone done this with Copyparty and if so how is the performance?

yownie

a month ago

I just wish this did some sort of federation so I could set it up and link it with friends, and then file dedup.

fzorb

a month ago

What I find coolest about Copyparty is how small of a footprint it has. My local Copyparty server uses 38mb of ram. I couldn't imagine a piece of software like it with as many features have such low ram consumption until I saw it.

honktime

a month ago

I like the idea of something like this with video transcoding (this just does audio). I dont need many of the features of Jellyfin, it'd just be nice to have a browser client for my video files though.

underlines

a month ago

I also look for a sophisticated self hosted, open source transcoding solution as a web app, but in the mean time, the complete opposite: no bells and whistles, no config, no control except size: https://github.com/JMS1717/8mb.local

or do you mean a web based file manager / video gallery with transcoding capabilities?

thepra

a month ago

I can't find an alternative to nextcloud keepass file open and manage in browser :/

nobody42

a month ago

Attack surface of this thing gives me existential dread.

jesprenj

a month ago

too bad it doesn't use unix users and file permissions via pam and reinvents the wheel with their own accounts and permissions.

yjftsjthsd-h

a month ago

On the one hand: Yes, that would be a fairly elegant design.

On the other hand: That assumes that it's running on a unix (at a minimum, it supports Windows), requires that the user/admin of copyparty be the admin of the machine it's running on, and conflates things that can be different domains.

danishSuri1994

a month ago

[flagged]

drnick1

a month ago

> Works great over Tailscale/home lab setups

I think it's better to avoid commercial dependencies like Tailscale in a "home lab" setup if you can. You can set up a plain Wireguard tunnel and manage your own keys just fine at that kind of scale without some third part identity provider collecting your data.

t_mann

a month ago

What about Headscale?

> Headscale is an open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

https://headscale.net/

Glemkloksdjf

a month ago

I tried it a few month ago. I wanted to move 2tb of different type of data from one pc to a server.

The upload of these files were horrendes, it was slow on computing something, it was slow in transfering and the ui sucked.

I enabled sshd and moved everything over with scp.

I loved the video, i hated my one time experience with it :|

wbolt

a month ago

At this moment there are 8 security issues open on GitHub (2 of them marked as High) and more than 190 issues in general. So it does look like a work-in-progress thing to me.

The application seems very cute and handy and it still might be very useful in a lot of specific use cases. Just keep in mind that it might not be production ready for you.

tripflag

a month ago

Just to clarify that the 8 security announcements are not open issues; they are announcements that a new release has been made which fixed something security-related. I'm doing my best keeping a good track-record for fixing such issues in a timely manner, and the turnaround time for severe issues has so far been <=4 hours.

As for the open issues, 140 are feature suggestions, and 36 are currently classified as bugs. I'm hoping to start popping the list of bugs soon after I'm back home from my vacation which will be soon (am typing this from the airport waiting to board!)

philipallstar

a month ago

> I'm hoping to start popping the list of bugs soon after I'm back home from my vacation which will be soon (am typing this from the airport waiting to board!)

Don't burn yourself out. This is some really good software and we need you around to maintain it :)