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.
Put out some in-depth docker instructions and this will be common use in a month. Good work.
Yup, I tried to run the docker image with the suggested docker command and it errored out for lack of a config file (though it did offer a fix in the logs for mounting the current directory as read/write)
Ho… Ly… Shit… This is great! The UI is a bit confusing at first but doesn’t take long to get what’s going on. I might even be disappointed with a UI revamp 😁 I can’t believe how much functionality this has. It’s already replacing some processes I have for mounting drives and backing up files. Maybe I missed something, but my only complaint would be the lack of an automatic one-way folder sync in the Party UP! app.
I’m blown away, great job!
I bumped into copyparty the other month when looking for a software that could let me transfer files to a friend with the ability to pause/resume. Didn’t bother with it, tried another software instead. Never really got it to work so I gave up on it.
Bumped into the YouTube video today, decided to give copyparty a shot, damn sir you’ve written a fine piece of software. It’s so easy to get up and configure. The UI is a bit janky, but charming at the same time. Thanks for all the hard work!
You made this on your phone on the bus ride to and from work.
I cleaned the cat box yesterday and considered that an accomplishment.
Fuck.
Congrats on the cat box cleaning!
Elderly raspberry pi B [✓]
Large portable drive gathering dust [✓]
Guess I’m setting up a locally hosted file server in the near future.
Holy shit this is so unbelievably full featured it’s not even funny. This is going to rattle some big names. I wonder how long till they try to shut it down because it’s better than anything commercially available.
I haven’t even tried it yet, but just from the video you can tell it’s going to be insanely good. I’m so impressed.
It’s the first bit of software I’ve seen in a long time where I took one look and immediately thought “Fuck me, I need that!”
I use Unraid for my NAS server and just on the off-chance I checked the Unraid community ‘app store’ and someone’s already created a Docker definition for it, published just today! The hype is real
I’ll be giving this a shot
Thanks for making the video but also for providing non Youtube link. Maybe there is a PeerTube server that would enjoy hosting it.
Is there a way to help translate the UI.
I would like to help translate it into Danish.
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 see flake.nix, i install.
this looks amazing! (from the youtube video. also the controls/features seem to be well thought-through) i’ll give it a shot tomorrow
I played around with copyparty and I have to say it is just awesome! The config is just fun to mess around with and everything feels snappy.
But I ran into an issue with FTP (probably just something I configured incorrectly) and could not find a discussion for that. I should probably start an issue on Github but as a non-developer I’m not sure how to do that in the correct way.
Thank you so very much. I needed to transfer some files locally yesterday and didn’t have a NAS set up. So I thought I would quickly set up a samba share on my pop-os media server so my spouse (windows) and I (mint) could swap/store files on the fly in the future. It took me 25 minutes and I almost gave up because my config file was having issues.
This looks sooooo much nicer. May every road rise up to meet you
I would add PairDrop to your list to have bookmarked. It’s completely web-based so no download required and thus fully cross-platform. It also works across different networks (i.e. over the internet) by pairing devices or creating a room. Basically Apple AirDrop, but universal and on steroids.
Hey fellow scener, cool project!
Just a few thoughts/questions:
- BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.
- Why have it be one huge python source file? This is a serious code smell imo, and something you really should avoid doing as this can be a major maintenance burden.
BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.
yeah that’s a good point, I’ll add an option to take advantage of this if you know you’re running on a filesystem where that works as intended.
Why have it be one huge python source file?
oh don’t worry, it’s all separate files during development – there’s a build-stage which bundles everything up into a single file for distribution. But thanks for the concern :D
Ah, so you have compiled it into one file? Didn’t know that was possible for python, what tool do you use for this?
sooo this is one of the things that started with someone saying “wouldn’t it be funny if…”
if you open copyparty-sfx.py in a text editor, you’ll see how – but please make sure to use an editor which is able to handle about 600 KiB of comments which contain invalid utf8 / binary garbage 😁
I ended up rolling my own packer since I wanted optimal encoding efficiency, and everything I could find would do stuff like base85 or ucs2 tricks, but it turns out python is perfectly happy with binary garbage in comments if you declare that the file is
latin-1so it realizes all hope is lost :Dthe only drawback of the sfx.py is that it needs to extract to $TEMP before running, so that’s the slight advantage of the zipapp (the .pyz alternative), but that suffers from some performance reduction in return, and is more hermetic (doesn’t let you swap out the bundled dependencies with fresh versions as easily if necessary)
Why not use zipapp?
What do you use to bundle into one file?
copyparty-sfx.pyis a custom packer (see this reply) created by make-sfx.sh, andcopyparty.pyzis a standard zipapp, created by make-pyz.sh. The zipapp has more disadvantages than thesfx.py, so that’s the default/recommended build.
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.
