filebin2

Filebin2 is a web application that facilitates convenient file sharing over the web. It is the software that powers https://filebin.net. It is still in development status and will see breaking changes.

Table of contents

• Why filebin2?
• Development environment
• Usage
• Integrations

Why filebin2?

A couple of (in hindsight) bad architectural decisions in the previous version of filebin paved the road for filebin2. Filebin2 is using a PostgreSQL database to handle meta data and S3 to store files. I decided to move to a new repository because of breaking changes from the previous verson of filebin.

Development environment

The development environment consists of one PostgreSQL instance, one MinIO object storage instance and an instance of filebin2. The easiest way to set up this environment is to clone this repository and do:

docker-compose up --build

This will make:

• Filebin2 available on http://localhost:8080/.
• Filebin2 admin available on http://admin:changeme@localhost:8080/admin.
• MinIO available on http://localhost:9000/.
• PostgreSQL available on localhost:5432.

Usage

Filebin can run in most Linux distributions, and most likely other operating systems like MacOS. It runs fine in Docker, but doesn't need to run in Docker.

Filebin requires read write access to an S3 bucket for file storage and a PostgreSQL database that it will use for meta data.

The Filebin program itself is written in Go and builds to a single binary that is configured using command line arguments.

Testing and building

The easiest way to run the test suite is to run it in docker compose. Docker will exit successfully (return code 0) if the tests succeed, and exit with an error code other than 0 if the tests fail.

docker-compose -f ci.yml up --abort-on-container-exit

The program can be built using:

make linux

The output will be the Filebin program as a single binary in the artifacts/ folder called filebin2-linux-amd64. This binary takes the command line arguments listed below.

Command line arguments

--access-log string (default: "/var/log/filebin/access.log")

Path to a filename for the access log output.

--admin-password string (default: not set)

Password to require for access to the /admin endpoint. If the password is not set, then the admin endpoint will not be available. Make sure to keep this password a secret.

--admin-username string (default: not set)

Username to require for access to the /admin endpoint. If the password is not set, then the admin endpoint will not be available.

--allow-robots (default: not set)

If this argument is set, then the X-Robots-Tag response header will allow search engines to index and show Filebin in search results. Otherwise, robots will be instructed to not show files and bins in search results.

--baseurl string (default: "https://filebin.net")

The base URL to use, which impacts URLs that are presented to the user for files and bins, and it needs to point to the hostname of the filebin instance.

--db-host string (default: none)

Which PostgreSQL host to connect to. This can be an IP address or a hostname.

--db-name string (default: none)

The name of the PostgreSQL database to use.

--db-password string (default: none)

The password to use when authenticating to the PostgreSQL database.

--db-port string (default: none)

The port to use when connecting to the PostgreSQL database.

--db-username string (default: none)

The username to use when authenticating to the PostgreSQL database.

--expiration int (default: 604800)

Bin expiration time in seconds since the last bin update. Bins will be inaccessible after this time, and files will be removed by the lurker (see --lurker-interval).

--limit-file-downloads uint (default: disabled)

This argument can be used to limit the number of downloads per file. 0, which is default, means no limit. If the value is 100, then each file can be downloaded 100 times before further downloads are rejected.

--limit-storage string (default: disabled)

This argument can be used to limit the storage capacity that filebin will use. 0, which is default, means no limit. If the value is set to "200GB", then filebin will allow file uploads until the total amount of storage capacity used by files uploaded to filebin surpass 200 GB. New file uploads will be rejected until storage consumption is below 200 GB again (see --lurker-interval).

--listen-host string (default: "127.0.0.1")

Which IP address Filebin will bind to. The default value of 127.0.0.1 is a safe default that does not expose Filebin outside of the host.

--listen-port int (default: 8080)

Which port Filebin will listen to. The default of 8080 does not require privileged access.

--log-retention uint (default: 7)

The number of days to keep transaction log entries in the PostgreSQL database before they are removed by the lurker (see --lurker-interval).

--lurker-interval int (default: 300)

The lurker is a batch job that runs automatically and in the background to delete expired bins and remove old log entries from the database. This argument is used to specify the time to for the lurker to sleep between in between each execution. The value is specified in seconds.

--manual-approval (default: not set)

If this argument is set, then the administrator needs to manually approve new bins before files and archives can be downloaded. Bin and file operations except downloading are accepted while a bin is pending approval. This is a mechanism added to limit abuse.

The API request used to approve a bin is an authenticated PUT /admin/approve/{bin}

--metrics-username (default: not set)

The username used for authentication to the /metrics endpoint for Prometheus metrics. If the username is not set, this endpoint is disabled.

--metrics-password (default: not set)

The password used for authentication to the /metrics endpoint for Prometheus metrics. If the username is not set, this endpoint is disabled.

--metrics (default: false)

Enables the /metrics endpoint. If this is not set, the endpoint will not return any metrics.

--metrics-auth (default: not set)

Enables authentication. Currently only basic auth is supported. If --metrics-auth or (env) METRICS_AUTH is set to basic basic auth will be in play. If not, the endpoint is open to the world.

--metrics-id (default: hostname)

The string used as the identification of the filebin instance in the Prometheus metrics. By default, this string is the $HOSTNAME environment variable.

--metrics-proxy-url (default: not set)

When this argument is set, Filebin will fetch the content from the URL specified and merge it with its own output on the /metrics endpoint. This can be useful when running another Prometheus exporter in the same operating system instance, for example to capture system metrics.

--mmdb string (default: not set)

The path to an mmdb formatted geoip database like GeoLite2-City.mmdb. This is optional.

--proxy-headers (default: not set)

If this argument is set, then the client IP will be read from the proxy headers provided in the incoming HTTP requests. This argument should only be set if there is an HTTP proxy running in front of Filebin, that is using the proxy headers to tell Filebin the original client IP address.

--reject-file-extensions string (default: not set)

A whitespace separated list of file extensions that will be rejected. Example: "exe bat dll".

--s3-access-key string (default: not set)

The access key to use when connecting to the S3 bucket where files will be stored.

--s3-bucket string (default: not set)

The name of the bucket in S3 where files will be stored.

--s3-endpoint string (default: not set)

The S3 endpoint to connect to. This can be the hostname or IP address. When self hosting S3 on a non-standard port, the port can be specified using hostname:port.

--s3-region string (default: not set)

The S3 region where the bucket lives.

-s3-secret-key string (default: not set)

The secret key to use when connecting to the S3 bucket where files will be stored.

--s3-secure (default: true)

Whether or not Filebin will require the connection to S3 to be TLS encrypted using https. If this parameter is set to false, then Filebin will attempt connecting to S3 using plain http.

--s3-trace (default: not set)

Enable S3 HTTP tracing for debugging. This will provide verbose logging on file uploads.

--s3-url-ttl string (default: "1m")

When a Filebin user downloads a file, that is done using a presigned URL that contains a token with limited time to live. The default allows presigned URLs to be used for 1 minute before they expire. The value is specified using the time unit, and some examples are 30s, 5m and 2h.

--slack-channel string (default: none)

If Filebin is set to require manual approval of new bins (see --manual-approval), then this approval can be given using the user interface, the http api directly or via Slack (using the http api).

The http endpoint /integration/slack can be accessed using a webhook from Slack.

This parameter limits which Slack channel that is allowed to access the http api. Requests from other channels will be rejected.

--slack-domain string (default: not set)

This argument limits which Slack domain that is allowed to access the http api. Other domains will be rejected.

--slack-secret string (default: not set)

This argument specifies the secret that Slack will need to use when connecting to the http api. If this secret is not set, the Slack integration will be disabled.

--tmpdir string

Directory for temporary files for upload and download (default "/tmp").

Integrations

Grafana and Prometheus

Filebin2 comes with a /metrics endpoint that is compatible with Prometheus. There is an example dashboard that visualizes this data.

Slack

This integration may be useful if manual approval is required (see --manual-approval). The integration allows members of a Slack channel to list the recently updated bins and approve specific bins directly in the Slack channel using slash commands. The slash commands available are:

The documention on how to configure Slack to work with this integration does not exist currently.