Looking for self-hosted filesharing software
Sun, 18 Dec 2016 10:18 categories: blog, debianThe owncloud package was removed from Debian unstable and testing. I am thus now looking for an alternative. Unfortunately, finding such replacement seems to be harder than I initially thought, even though I only use a very small subset of what owncloud provides. What I require is some software which allows me to:
- upload a directory of files of any type to my server (no "distributed" filesharing where I have to stay online with my laptop)
- share the content of that directory via HTTP (no requirement to install any additional software other than a web browser)
- let the share-links be private (no possibility to infer the location of other shares)
- allow users to browse that directory (image thumbnails or a photo gallery would be nice)
- allow me to allow anonymous users to upload their own content into that directory (also only requiring their web browser)
- already in Debian or easy to package and maintain due to low complexity (I don't have enough time to become the next "owncloud maintainer")
I thought this was a pretty simple task to solve but I am unable to find any software that fits above criteria.
The below table shows the result of my research of what's currently available. The columns mark whether the respective software fulfills one of the six criteria from above.
| Software | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| owncloud | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
| sparkleshare | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| dvcs-autosync | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| git annex assistant | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| syncthing | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| pydio | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
| seafile | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
| sandstorm.io | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ |
| ipfs | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ | ✘ |
| bozon | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
| droppy | ✔ | ✔ | ✔ | ✘ | ✘ | ✔ |
Pydio, seafile and sandstorm.io look promising but they seem to be beasts similar in complexity to owncloud as they bring features like version tracking, office integration, wikis, synchronization across multiple devices or online editing of files which are features that I do not need.
I would already be very happy if there was a script which would make it easy to create a hard-to-guess symlink to a directory with data tracked by git annex under my www-root and then generate some static HTML to provide a thumbnails view or a photo gallery. Unfortunately, even that solution would not be sufficient as it would still disallow public upload by anybody whom I would give the link to...
If you know some software that meets my criteria or would like to submit corrections to above table, please shoot an email to josch@debian.org. Thanks!