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.
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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.
OMG I just posted this to lemmy and saw it had already been posted. Great work! Amazing video!!
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 agree but it’s still in an early development state. Not really usable for everyday work let alone most people never heard about it 😅 But yeah still cool to mention it under “modern” browsers. I wish them good luck with the first alpha next year. I hope it’ll be successful.
Can claim “It even works with browsers from the future!”
Look cool! I think you should consider putting a screenshot of the UI somewhere near the top of the README
Very sleek project. The language switcher bit was brilliant hahaha. Seriously, good job.
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.
I have a samba fileserver behind wireguard. Would copyparty be an improvement over samba?
If all you need is basic remote file storage such as a samba server, and especially if you need samba in particular, then your current solution is probably a better fit for you.
Copyparty’s main selling points is the large number of features in one package, and being pretty good at receiving file uploads (usually faster than other alternatives), but it does not have good samba support. Instead of samba, copyparty has WebDAV support, so you can still connect to it from your file manager – but the performance will be different; depending on your access pattern and the type of files, it could be faster or slower than samba.
I like samba because I can mount it as a folder in the file explorer of my Linux desktop. But Samba is a little slow.
Why use smba when there’s NFS?
You can also mount WebDAV folders like that.
This looks sick. Thanks for making and sharing it!
Looks really cool. Might spin up a test bed to try.
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. :-)
That won’t work for me since I have multiple people using this Nextcloud instance, and I also use it to publicly share files. I also have a big network share (currently 5 TB of data) that I would like to better integrate somehow (right now it’s available from Nextcloud read-only in essentially “anonymous mode” with no access to private user files).
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.
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.
Nextcloud is like Windows 95, it works great when you install it then it just keeps getting slower as you fill it with content
Also, it’s like Wordpress, growing new slow features you’ll never need with each new release.
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.
Screenshots of the ui at the top of the readme would be nice
I have a question, and I want to emphasise thar this is not criticism but a request for dive into technicalities.
In the video you mentioned copyparty has an one-way sync tool. Is there a good reason why it’s not two-way, or is this just something you weren’t motivated to do?
No worries, good question :>
The problem with bidirectional filesync is that it’s an absolutely massive can of worms, very easy to mess up, and the consequences of messing up are usually the worst kind (loss of data). There’s an insane amount of edgecases to keep in mind, and you need to get every edgecase right every single time, otherwise you might wipe someone’s vacation photos, or suddenly downgrade someone’s keepass database to an older version… And stuff like syncing multiple devices to the same server makes it balloon further.
I’ve started becoming more confident in copyparty’s filesystem-index database, but it’s still just a hint/guideline, with the filesystem being the only source of truth – it’s still not something I’d trust with tracking sync-state against one or more clients.
The bigger guys who offer bidirectional sync (nextcloud, syncthing, etc.) have spent years perfecting their logic, so I’d like to leave this in their capable hands.
Sync is one of those things that seems like it should be trivial but is actually super complicated.
Thank you for your answer! Do you think copyparty would work together with Syncthing on the same backing directory, or would they compete for changes etc? Copyparty in this scenario would be for sharing content with friends and occasional remote upload
that should be totally fine, I think a lot of people are doing that :>
Great software!
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.
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.
