Ask HN: Static Site Generator for photo and video sharing | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Static Site Generator for photo and video sharing

7 pointsdv35z3 comments

I’ve had several recent issues where videos I sent from my iPhone ended up in “tiny” low-res mode for the recipient. It got me thinking- I ought to be able to easyly upload a video to my own server, and them a link to it. It is 2023. We have the technology.

So that brings us to: Media hosting question - I recently setup a knowledge base (Markdown/Obsidian/MkDocs/GitHub/Render.com/iCloud/Working Copy), and I’m looking for a similar setup for media hosting. I’d like a public domain (media.example.com), easy for me to upload into from iPhone - ideally using the Files app. Basically, Dropbox, but its using my own personal cloud infrastructure. Having password protected areas would be great (family photo albums?), and expiring links could be useful too

My current files situation is a scatter between iCloud, Google Drive, archives in a (currently offline) Synology NAS. Relatedly, would love to hear about peoples personal IT file system setup, who are thinking at a 10 year+ horizon… and don’t want to be fulltime sysadmin as a 3rd job.

My solution for first party public media distribution is Caddy¹ on Scaleway Stardust². The 10gb of storage isn't really enough space (more can be purchased; I still need to find a proxy for the 75gb of free S3-compatible object storage), but it inlcudes unmetered 100mbps data transfer for $3/month. I proxy through Caddy to dufs³ to upload files via the web (could probably just use dufs alone). Caddy can do basic auth but expiring links would be more work.

Anything worth keeping goes on an external HD locally; buy a bigger one yearly and make another copy (move the old one offsite). After experiencing the death of several HDs I also upload all irreplaceable video to Youtube as private videos. I recently went through and manually granted a few people access by pasting their Gmail into the 200+ they wanted to see; need to automate this tedious process.

¹https://caddyserver.com

²https://www.scaleway.com/en/stardust-instances

³https://github.com/sigoden/dufs

+1 for caddy, it's an excellent server that's super easy to configure, low overhead and low-maintenance. The automatic ssl certificate handling is a nice bonus as well.

SSL actually led my reasons for choosing it, and it wound up being the right choice because of how easily it can be configured as a proxy for a FastCGI shell script: https://hn-notes.pages.dev/20221128

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