File sharing alternative to coquelicot

Development
1

Problem: Coquelicot’s (the file sharing app) author has stopped maintaining it. The app is in Ruby and future Ruby binary upgrades are affecting the working of the app. We need to look for a replacement.

I was discussing this briefly with @njoseph and we had the following options in mind:

  1. Fix coquelicot for newer Ruby versions
  2. Find a new project that accomplishes this and integrate with FreedomBox (package for Debian if necessary)
  3. Write a fresh alternative

I was exploring option 2, and assumed the following features to be present in the alternative:

  1. A web frontend
  2. Has the ability to generate a unique link for the file to be shared

I found this https://github.com/YouTransfer/YouTransfer
Let me know what you think about this. Also drop in your opinions on the above options.

3 Likes
2

Ooh! This looks promising!

I think a lot of Freedombox users were eager to use Coquelicot (again), and I consider the ability to share files privately and securely without using third party services a big selling point of the Freedombox vision. And this was the main reason I bought my little box (Micro) - so I could serve large photo archives to my clients.

So +1 for YouTransfer!

2 Likes
3

Framasoft is using Lufi for their encrypted file-sharing service hosted at framadrop.org.
I filed an RFP for it. Any help with Debian packaging is welcome!

YouTransfer doesn’t do client-side encryption like Lufi. Also, it is currently looking for maintainers.
We tried Filetea and Coquelicot earlier. They were both abandoned by their upstream maintainers. Hence, we had to drop them from FreedomBox as well.
I’m betting on Lufi being maintained since Framasoft is using it in production.

2 Likes
4

Here’s the dependency analysis for YouTransfer
https://wiki.debian.org/Javascript/Nodejs/Tasks/YouTransfer

5

I think option 2 and your listed features are a great start. I think this would go well with the “File explorer” being talked about in another development thread. Unfortunately, I’m running FreedomBox on a raspberry pi 2 and I don’t have a supported version of coquelicot available. This feature hast the power to make a Pi with an external drive an absolute productivity machine! So give it a shot, thanks for your contribution!

6

@bitsapien, what’s the status of this topic?

7

(post deleted by author)

1 Like
8

Hello All,

Would onionshare be suitable ?

Regards: peter

9

Though OnionShare is a desirable application for FreedomBox, it is in a different category from apps like Coquelicot (and its current replacement - Bepasty). Onionshare requires the sender to be online for the receiver to download the file (another example is Filetea). In my opinion, FreedomBox should also have Onionshare in addition to an app like Bepasty.

In its current form, OnionShare is a P2P desktop application which we can recommend to FreedomBox users.

Maybe the value that FreedomBox can add to OnionShare can be similar to the case of Syncthing. The sender has a file on a computer which is not their FreedomBox and they need to send it anonymously to a receiver who will download it over the Tor network. The sender doesn’t wish to stay online until the receiver accepts the file. Their FreedomBox server is always online (need not be exposed to the internet). So, they can upload the file to their FreedomBox and share the onion link using OnionShare.

OnionShare also has the feature of acting as an anonymous drop box, though I’m not calling it a replacement for SecureDrop, which is also a relevant FreedomBox app.

If there were a web application for OnionShare, it would’ve worked well for the use case mentioned above just like it does for Syncthing.

1 Like