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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.

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[-] perishthethought@piefed.social 7 points 1 week ago

The fact you mention security features, without ever saying it's 'super secure' tells me you know a lot about what you're doing. I'm so sick of apps like this that start with "most secure app on the net" but you know they're delusional. Thank you, going to check this out.

[-] danhab99@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago

Oh my gawd what a README!! I'm on my phone and I was trying to scroll back to the top of it from the bottom and I just kept on scrolling... Holy shit I'm going to put this on my kanban board give it proper attention

[-] cwista@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

At this rate might be faster to read code than a read me. Or convert to a wiki style if this much details are really needed.

[-] muusemuuse@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.

[-] lemmyhavesome@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

Haven't looked at the project yet, but that's just the greatest name for a fileserver...

[-] uzay@infosec.pub 4 points 1 week ago

Look cool! I think you should consider putting a screenshot of the UI somewhere near the top of the README

[-] RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 4 points 1 week ago

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?

[-] poVoq@slrpnk.net 4 points 1 week ago

Clearly a labour of love 👍

Maybe support for some music streaming apps (subsonic?) would be cool?

[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

That's a neat idea -- I've heard that a lot of stuff uses the subsonic API under the hood, so I'll see what it would take to become compatible with that. At first glance it looks like I'd have to mine and index way more information about audio files, but could still be doable :>

Very sleek project. The language switcher bit was brilliant hahaha. Seriously, good job.

[-] johntash@eviltoast.org 3 points 1 week ago

Your readme looks super in depth, thanks for that! I haven't watched the video yet but will later.

I didn't see it mentioned from a quick glance, but is either sftp or ftps supported?

[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 4 points 1 week ago

SFTP is not currently on the roadmap, but it's not entirely implausible.

FTPS is supported, but it requires an optional dependency to be installed (pyopenssl), so it's not available in the Windows EXE. And I just realized that the dependency is currently not present inside the docker images either, so I'll get that fixed right away.

[-] xnx@slrpnk.net 2 points 1 week ago

Screenshots of the ui at the top of the readme would be nice

[-] chellomere@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

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.
[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

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

[-] chellomere@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Ah, so you have compiled it into one file? Didn't know that was possible for python, what tool do you use for this?

[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

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-1 so it realizes all hope is lost :D

the 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)

[-] RecallMadness@lemmy.nz 1 points 1 week ago

What do you use to bundle into one file?

[-] suzune@ani.social 1 points 1 week ago

Just a remark from someone who runs ZFS since the beginning. Many people don't like the deduplication feature because of its memory footprint.

It's also nice to have this feature without relying on a certain filesystem.

[-] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Elderly raspberry pi B [✓]

Large portable drive gathering dust [✓]

Guess I'm setting up a locally hosted file server in the near future.

[-] shiftymccool@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago

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!

[-] hperrin@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

Can you point me to the WebDAV code? I’m interested to see your implementation. There are some parts of the spec that are ambiguous, and I like to see how those are implemented in different servers.

[-] pwalker@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

you even mention ladybird as browser, nice 😎

[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

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.

[-] pwalker@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 1 week ago

I agree but it's still in an early development state. Not really usable for everyday work let alone most people never heard about it 😅 But yeah still cool to mention it under "modern" browsers. I wish them good luck with the first alpha next year. I hope it'll be successful.

[-] hexagonwin@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 1 week ago

Looks fantastic, I'll actually be trying this. Love how it doesn't lock my files into some obscure format like seafiles.

[-] cyrano@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

This is really impressive

[-] kayohtie@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago

Great job on something like this! I'll probably give it a whirl soon, I like Nextcloud but find it clunky sometimes because it's often a bit more than I need. Maybe breaking it up into Immich + this would help! Thank you for sharing your project!

One thing to note, your comparison against Nextcloud has a partially-incorrect point regarding file upload max size. The client does upload chunking, so is unaffected by the Cloudflare issue as well, but I believe the web client is still affected, just not the apps. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/big_file_upload_configuration.html#adjust-chunk-size-on-nextcloud-side

I suspect a few others may be as well, but I'm only familiar with the Nextcloud one because that's what I've been running, and discovered in making sure I could still upload video files recorded while out and about.

Also love that it looks like a simpler install!

[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Thanks for the correction; confirmed that Nextcloud now does chunked uploading (with the web-client too). Fixed :>

Good luck, and let me know if you hit any issues o/

[-] twikz@sopuli.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

Now it would be interesting to setup a raspberry pi with harddrives plugged in the USB 3 ports💡

[-] ayyy@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 week ago

Everyone loves CP. Tell all your friends about CP.

[-] Pall@piefed.social 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Is there a way to help translate the UI.

I would like to help translate it into Danish.

[-] Dojan@pawb.social 1 points 1 week ago

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!

[-] KiwiTB@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago

Put out some in-depth docker instructions and this will be common use in a month. Good work.

[-] 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de 0 points 1 week ago

Oh my god, this seems really good and closer to what I want than anything yet. Been looking for something to replace Nextcloud and found nothing good so I might take a look at this.

[-] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

Just curious, why did you replace nextcloud? I'm looking into transitioning from my current file server, and I've mostly heard only good things and not NextCloud.

[-] RheumatoidArthritis@mander.xyz 1 points 1 week ago

Nextcloud is like Windows 95, it works great when you install it then it just keeps getting slower as you fill it with content

[-] tux0r@feddit.org 2 points 1 week ago

Also, it’s like Wordpress, growing new slow features you’ll never need with each new release.

[-] tux0r@feddit.org 0 points 1 week ago

Can we have Gopher support?

[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

I was thinking of that!! But then I realized that even Firefox removed gopher support by now, so the joke was dead on arrival :P

[-] tux0r@feddit.org 1 points 1 week ago

Firefox isn’t that great for FTP either. Gopher still exists :-) and I’d love to use it even more.

[-] disobey2623@lemmy.dbzer0.com 0 points 1 week ago

I looked at the comparison for Seafile as that's the one I'm most familiar with. In my opinion Seafile's greatest strength is its encryption, but in your comparison you seem to see this as a negative as I assume this bullet refers to the encryption? "isolated on-disk file hierarchy, incompatible with other software. much worse than nextcloud in that regard"

[-] tripflag@lemmy.world 0 points 1 week ago

the intention with that statement was that seafile, by default, places all the files inside its own proprietary file container thing, where the files are not easily accessible from the server's actual filesystem, using regular linux utilities. My knowledge of seafile is really minimal, so this could be wrong -- in which case I'll fix that right away! or, at the very least, try to clarify what I meant to avoid this confusion.

in case you happen to know -- are you aware if it's possible to use Seafile while having it just place all the files and folders on the disk like any other program would?

[-] Andres4NY@social.ridetrans.it 0 points 1 week ago

@tripflag @disobey2623 Your statement is correct; the way seafile stores files is in blocks (for de-duplication, apparently).

They offer a fuse extension that allows you to view stuff like a normal filesystem, though I've never tried it: https://manual.seafile.com/latest/extension/fuse/

[-] disobey2623@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 week ago

And obviously, encrypted folders can't be accessed through the file system even with the fuse add on, because that would break the whole point of encryption.

To me, the one big advantage Seafile has is its e2e encryption and encrypted folders, as it allows me to host it externally without allowing access to my files to the server administrator.

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this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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