Copyparty, the FOSS file server [video] | Hacker News Reader

Copyparty, the FOSS file server [video]

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236 pointsfranczesko57 comments

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.

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

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.

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

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

https://github.com/9001/copyparty/

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

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

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

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

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.

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

What are you using it for?

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.

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.

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

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

wait wat

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.

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.

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.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44711519

I knew I've already seen this. Seemed like a great tool then as well as now. Will definitively deploy it on for my personal file server. Just haven gotten around it.

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.

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?

sqlitedict? Or shelve/dbm?

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).

pickledb? [0]

[0] https://github.com/patx/pickledb

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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...

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

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. :(

I was not aware of OPDS, thanks

https://github.com/koreader/koreader/wiki/OPDS-support

I run tailscale on the devices to get back to my home server while out and about.

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?

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

Tailscale

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.

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.

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?

Is there a link to the actual project?

I've been using file browser in an unprivledged container but always open to new stuff.

https://github.com/9001/copyparty/

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

Glad it exists but hated using it

Wait really? What was so terrible?

Attack surface of this thing gives me existential dread.

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

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.

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 :|

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.

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!)

> 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 :)

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