quickserve - easy ad-hoc file sharing

Xyne · 2009-11-28 18:11:47

Project Info

http://xyne.archlinux.ca/projects/quickserve

Quickserve is a very easy to use HTTP server that lets you quickly share files with others. It supports HTTP Digest authentication, HTTPS (with both server and client certificates), and file uploads, among other things. Take a look at the project page above for more information.

Screenshots

News

2013-05-12
Quickserve now has some peer-to-peer functionality via multicast and static peers. The interface will optionally detect other servers and query them for requested files.

Install it on two different systems, open up the ports if necessary and try this:

quickserve --multicast --remote-remote /path/to/whatever

You now have a file-sharing server that will show you all files available on the local Quickserve network.

2013-05-10
Quickserve has been completely rewritten in Python 3.

new HTML pages
support for mapping arbitrary server paths to local file paths
multiple local directories can now appear as a single directory
much cleaner, modular code that has been moved to a separate module
standardized page generators (not provides HTML, JSON, plaintext, very easy to add more)
new options: --unhide, --index

Questions, comments and other feedback are welcome as always. Enjoy!

Last edited by Xyne (2013-05-12 22:32:15)

DonVla · 2009-11-28 18:16:17

Looks pretty nice, Xyne.
Though some simple authentication and port change would be very useful.

Xyne · 2009-11-28 18:21:03

Xyne wrote:

There are options for changing the port and binding the address.

DonVla wrote:

Though some simple authentication and port change would be very useful.

I'll look into simple authentication but I think Python's BaseHTTPServer is rather limited. It doesn't really matter though as this is intended to be run behind a LAN firewall anyway, i.e. to share files with someone in the same house, not over the network, and it's not meant to be running constantly.

As for the port... you can change that with "-p <port>".

Last edited by Xyne (2009-11-28 18:21:22)

DonVla · 2009-11-28 18:38:03

I was thinking of smth to share files with friends over the inet.
I used gnump3d for music and now dropbox for all kind of files. And I always wanted to setup a simple httpd for that, so quickserve comes just handy.
Sure I do not intend to run it all the time, but I feel safer if there is a password set for the 1-2 hours it's running.

Vlad

PS: And what about the speed in LAN?
For now I'm using sshfs, because I'm too lazy to setup samba/nfs, and it's quite slow (~1MB/s). Is quickserve faster?

Last edited by DonVla (2009-11-29 04:41:25)

Xyne · 2009-11-28 18:43:49

I'm looking at the 'WWW-Authenticate' headers right now and will probably add an option to authenticate users.

As for speed it should be faster because it just sends the file (i.e. it does not encrypt it) but I would not use it for anything sensitive over a public connection, even if I doubt that anyone would be sniffing my packets. You'll have to test it yourself to see what kind of speed you get.

badboy · 2009-11-28 20:51:43

what exactly does it more than a simple

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

?

I aliased this command to "http". It's simple, easy and works.

Xyne · 2009-11-28 21:08:21

badboy wrote:

what exactly does it more than a simple
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
?
I aliased this command to "http". It's simple, easy and works.

I didn't know about that, but how can you specify which files are served?
Does it support authorization using the Digest method?

Anyway, I've added support for authorization. Curl and wget only seem to send 'Basic" headers and not 'Digest"... not sure why, but it works in Firefox.

DonVla · 2009-11-29 00:25:55

Hi Xyne,

I've tried quickserve and it works ok. But I can share only files not directories.
It would be nice if I could add whole directories. Smth like "quickserve /home/mp3" and then the directory is available for browsing. Is this possible? Or is it too much hassle?

Vlad

Xyne · 2009-11-29 17:07:45

added directory support

kjon · 2009-11-29 19:37:30

Xyne, this is a very nice app... xD

However, I got this message when sharing a directory with non english characters.

----------------------------------------
Exception happened during processing of request from ('127.0.0.1', 33302)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/SocketServer.py", line 281, in _handle_request_noblock
    self.process_request(request, client_address)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/SocketServer.py", line 307, in process_request
    self.finish_request(request, client_address)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/SocketServer.py", line 320, in finish_request
    self.RequestHandlerClass(request, client_address, self)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/SocketServer.py", line 615, in __init__
    self.handle()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 329, in handle
    self.handle_one_request()
  File "/usr/lib/python2.6/BaseHTTPServer.py", line 323, in handle_one_request
    method()
  File "/usr/bin/quickserve", line 102, in do_GET
    self.wfile.write(html.encode("utf-8"))
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 36: ordinal not in range(128)
----------------------------------------
^C^C received, shutting down server

Is there a way to solve this issue? Thanks.

Xyne · 2009-11-29 20:08:57

@kjon
Try again with the latest version and let me know if it works.

y27 · 2009-11-29 20:58:59

Awesome, very useful.
Thanks

badboy · 2009-11-29 21:22:05

Xyne wrote:

badboy wrote:
what exactly does it more than a simple
python -m SimpleHTTPServer
?
I aliased this command to "http". It's simple, easy and works.
I didn't know about that, but how can you specify which files are served?
Does it support authorization using the Digest method?

Anyway, I've added support for authorization. Curl and wget only seem to send 'Basic" headers and not 'Digest"... not sure why, but it works in Firefox.

I'm not a python coder and I don't know anything about how it works. I got this useful alias from the grml-zsh-config (http://grml.org/zsh/)
It just serves all files of the directory you started the server, listening on 0.0.0.0, port 8000.
Useful for quick data exchange here at home

But if your little script supports basic auth, than it's quite useful, too

wuischke · 2009-11-29 21:38:28

I like mongoose for setting up an ad-hoc web server. Just execute "mongoose" in the directory you want to share.

kjon · 2009-11-29 21:51:14

Xyne wrote:

@kjon
Try again with the latest version and let me know if it works.

Well, I could access to *some* of my folders, but these were empty. Others were, simply, unaccessible.

Thanks for your efforts, you solved me from a huge problem with this app. Thanks. again

[kjon@kjon-nc10 ~]$ quickserve .
started httpserver on :8080...
localhost.localdomain - - [29/Nov/2009 18:47:14] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 -
localhost.localdomain - - [29/Nov/2009 18:47:14] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 -
localhost.localdomain - - [29/Nov/2009 18:47:18] "GET /kjon HTTP/1.1" 200 -
localhost.localdomain - - [29/Nov/2009 18:47:24] "GET /kjon/medios HTTP/1.1" 200 -
localhost.localdomain - - [29/Nov/2009 18:47:28] "GET /kjon/medios/Im%C3%A1genes HTTP/1.1" 404 -
^C^C received, shutting down server

Im%C3%A1genes should be read as Imágenes (images in spanish).

Xyne · 2009-11-29 22:00:14

Considering the previous posts it seems that I need to specify exactly what quickserve does differently:

quickserve...
*) let's you specify whole directories and individual files anywhere on the system
*) supports HTTP Digest authorization
*) does not require a configuration file for specifying files, binding an address, choosing a port, setting up authorization, etc

I wrote it to suite my particular needs and am sharing it with others who might find it useful. If you don't, then don't use it. I don't mind questions to the effect of "What does it do differently than foo?" (for one, I got to learn about "python -m SimpleHTTPServer"), but what exactly is the point of posting a preference for another application in a contribution thread, especially when there are noticeable differences between it and the one under discussion?

It's like showing up at someone's house for taco night and then telling them that you don't like tacos so you're going to eat some burritos instead. Why bother coming to taco night in the first place?

Xyne · 2009-11-29 22:31:36

@kjon
Ok, I think I've discovered the problem (url encoding). The console will still display "Im%C3%A1genes" but now it should serve the files correctly.

Dime si puedes bajar tus imágenes ahora

kjon · 2009-11-30 00:06:22

@xine

La descarga fue un éxito xD

(That translation was too good for google-translate. Do you support spanish on your locales ? xD)

ammon · 2009-11-30 00:22:06

Thanks!

This is super awsome!

badboy · 2009-11-30 07:29:02

Xyne wrote:

Considering the previous posts it seems that I need to specify exactly what quickserve does differently:
quickserve...
*) let's you specify whole directories and individual files anywhere on the system
*) supports HTTP Digest authorization
*) does not require a configuration file for specifying files, binding an address, choosing a port, setting up authorization, etc
I wrote it to suite my particular needs and am sharing it with others who might find it useful. If you don't, then don't use it. I don't mind questions to the effect of "What does it do differently than foo?" (for one, I got to learn about "python -m SimpleHTTPServer"), but what exactly is the point of posting a preference for another application in a contribution thread, especially when there are noticeable differences between it and the one under discussion?
It's like showing up at someone's house for taco night and then telling them that you don't like tacos so you're going to eat some burritos instead. Why bother coming to taco night in the first place?

is this related to my post?
i didn't wan't to offend you. I just wanted to know if it is a improvement to the method I use atm. And thanks to your posting I can answer this with yes, because it supports authorization and let's me specify the files, to serve. so it is very helpful in some situations, even to me.

And hey: I like tacos

Xyne · 2009-11-30 09:42:34

kjon wrote:

@xine

kjon wrote:

La descarga fue un éxito xD

badboy wrote:

is this related to my post?

The statement of the differences was related to your post, but the part about being rude was only in reply to the post about using mongoose. I had hoped that the "I don't mind questions to the effect of 'What does it do differently than foo?'" would make this clear.

helpvampire · 2009-12-10 13:28:42

Nice blue square picture.

How to know what my internal IP address is and can this work on debian?

Xyne · 2009-12-10 21:44:31

@helpvampire
"ifconfig" will show you your IP on each interface ("inet addr")

You should be able to run quickserve on any system with Python installed.

Last edited by Xyne (2009-12-10 21:53:22)

helpvampire · 2009-12-11 14:01:48

OK thanks and what licence is it under?

Xyne · 2009-12-11 15:37:02

helpvampire wrote:

OK thanks and what licence is it under?

oO

The license is included in the source tarball, stated at the top of the script, visible on the AUR and included in the output of 'pacman -[SQ]i quickserve".

(GPLv2)

Arch Linux

#1 2009-11-28 18:11:47