How to make your own file sharing service

share.md

How to make your own file sharing service

What you want to do

Create a small utility that takes a folder you want to share, and creates a not-obvious URL that you can send to other humans.

What you need:

• A server you can SSH into
• a *nix machine

Step 1: Make a not-obvious URL

Because we are going to make your URL public, let's make it not-obvious so that people can't guess other URLs and steal files:

# make a random string
index=0
str=""
for i in {a..z}; do arr[index]=$i; index=`expr ${index} + 1`; done
for i in {A..Z}; do arr[index]=$i; index=`expr ${index} + 1`; done
for i in {0..9}; do arr[index]=$i; index=`expr ${index} + 1`; done
for i in {1..6}; do str="$str${arr[$RANDOM%$index]}"; done

Step 2: Compress the chosen folder or file and name it with this hard-to-guess name

# compress chosen folder
folder_name=$1
zip_name=$str".zip"
echo "Compressing into" $zip_name
zip -r -X -q $zip_name $1 # -X flag removes junk that Mac OS X adds

Step 3: Copy the .zip file to your server

# get the login name from some file (assumes you have public-key SSH set up)
login_id=$(<~/.server_id)

# copy to server
scp $zip_name $login_id:/path/to/html/folder/

Step 4: Copy the link to clipboard

# copy public link to clipboard 
echo $login_id/$zip_name | pbcopy
echo "Link copied to clipboard"

# delete the .zip file we made
rm $zip_name

The complete solution

Download the whole bash script here:

https://github.com/sg-s/auto-bots/blob/master/share.sh