apitinyfile

apitinyfile

apitinyfile is a tiny api server to allow (some or all of) reading, writing, and deleting files in a single directory, with support for TLS and basic authentication.

It is intended as a lightweight method of transferring files in ad-hoc or narrowly-focussed situations, with less overhead and exposure than using something broad like ssh.

It should be run as a non-privileged user with only the required permissions for the directory in question. It should NOT be run as root.

Installation

If you have go installed, you can do:

go install github.com/gavincarr/apitinyfile@latest

which installs the latest version of apitinyfile in your $GOPATH/bin or $HOME/go/bin directory (which you might need to add to your $PATH).

Usage

On your server:

# By default, binds to *:3137, with no TLS or authentication.
# Requires that you specify what operations to support (`-r/-w/-d` for
# read/write/delete, or `-a` for all), and the directory to use for all
# files (absolute or relative).
apitinyfile -rwd /path/to/directory

# To use TLS, you must also supply the TLS certificate and key files to use:
apitinyfile -a -c /path/to/tls/cert -k /path/to/tls/key /path/to/directory

# And to use basic authentication, you must also supply a valid `htpasswd` file
# with users and encrypted passwords (note that you should ALWAYS use TLS with
# basic authentication, since otherwise your credentials will be travelling in
# the clear on every request):
apitinyfile -a -c /path/to/tls/cert -k /path/to/tls/key -p /path/to/htpasswd /path/to/directory

# To bind to a different port and/or hostname, use the `-l/--listen` option:
apitinyfile -a -l 192.168.10.1:3000 /path/to/directory

# See all command-line options:
apitinyfile -h

api

apitestfile supports the following routes (if enabled by the operations options above on the server):

- GET /:filename - returns the contents of `filename` in your directory (if it exists)
- PUT /:filename - writes the request body to `filename` in your directory (creates/overwrites)
- DELETE /:filename - deletes `filename` in your directory (if it exists)

For example, if $URL is your apitinyfile base endpoint, you can do the following with curl to write, fetch, and delete a file called foo:

# Copy example.txt to `foo`
curl -X PUT --data-binary @example.txt $URL/foo

# Fetch `foo`
curl $URL/foo

# Delete `foo`
curl -X DELETE $URL/foo

Author

Copyright 2023 Gavin Carr gavin@openfusion.net.

Licence

apitinyfile is available under the terms of the MIT Licence.