I have a Samba mount at home (behind NAT, accessible via wireguard VPN), which works very well when accessing my home files when traveling (I travel a lot for work).
The only detail missing from this solution is sharing individual files with friends. I could give them access to my VPN, but that gives them access to everything, not just one thing I want to share. Also not all my friends are that tech savvy to manage connecting to a VPN.
What would be really great is to have a link-generator that punches a hole in the NAT to give them access to specific files. Are there any self-hosted solutions for that?
Try nextcloud. It can generate links to files like this.
100% this. I have one running in a lxc, and I expose it to the world through a CloudFlare tunnel so I needn’t worry about dyndns or people probing my public IP.
Mind if u ask how much that cloudflare front end costs you a month for how many hits?
I’m on their free tier. If you don’t have a domain you need to get one, but CloudFlare does offer domain registration basically at-cost.
Because I’m on free, I can’t break down my analytics like a paid account can. i can say though that for the past 30 days my account has generated 886k requests and 47.56GB of bandwidth. I can’t tell you how much of that is nextcloud and how much is other stuff, like audiobookshelf, but hopefully this helps answer you.
https://file.pizza/ just because the pizza toppings URLs are fun and nasty
not self-hosted
Do you have a domain? If you do, maybe try Nginx Proxy Manager and SFTPGo. I previously used File Browser but the developers made some fairly large breaking changes and I never went back. SFTPGo lets you add accounts easily and I have specific folder setup for sharing with friends. It has a clean interface too. If you don’t have a domain, maybe try Tailscale?
Another vote for Syncthing. Might be a little too complicated for some though
I use Filebrowser Quantum if you are happy opening up a port for it. It supports 2fa. Also requires Docker which isn’t too difficult.
Thanks! I went looking for something better than nextcloud, and this one really fit the ticket.
I had Nextcloud running for several years (VM is the best way IMO, I would avoid the Docker AIO). However I found Filebrowser and it rocks as a file share service. Filebrowser Quantum is a fork with more feature as the original no longer has a maintainer. The most I’ve had someone upload to it was 300GB.
I’ve been looking for something like this as well. Hopefully someone has a solution.
There are a few implementations of wormhole that might work.
If you’re ok with exposing a server to the internet, I’ve had good luck with sharry. https://eikek.github.io/sharry/
I’ve also had good luck running a Nextcloud instance to share with friends and family. But that is probably overkill here.
I use Pingvin. You upload a file to it and it generates a link. Has expiration on the link.
You can allow anonymous uploads or not, give friends logins etc.
I have it locked down to just me with a login and I use it to let others download the files.
I tried it but Copyparty worked better, it has a massive community suddenly and tons of cool features that mostly stay out of the way unless you enable them
I use owncloud
Not selfhosted but after I found catbox.Moe I haven’t had yo worry about sharing files.
It’s not quite self hosted, but Soulseek allows you to share share private directories with buddies. Soulseek might require a port forward.
Other than that, there are the many pasteboard solutions that have been mentioned. They’ll either require a port forward or reverse proxy (nginx etc.) to access outside the network though.
you might configure Syncthing in that way
If I’m understanding the OP’s use case, Syncthing is a poor choice for this. It’s great for power-user secure syncing, but not for casual sharing.
