duckie / plik

Plik is a scalable & friendly temporary file upload system ( wetransfer like ) in golang.

Plik

Plik is a scalable & friendly temporary file upload system ( wetransfer like ) in golang.

Main features

• Multiple data backends : File, OpenStack Swift, WeedFS
• Multiple metadata backends : File, MongoDB, Bolt
• OneShot : Files are destructed after the first download
• Stream : Files are streamed from the uploader to the downloader (nothing stored server side)
• Removable : Give the ability to the uploader to remove files at any time
• TTL : Custom expiration date
• Password : Protect upload with login/password (Auth Basic)
• Yubikey : Protect upload with your yubikey. (One Time Password)
• Comments : Add custom message (in Markdown format)
• User authentication : Google / OVH
• Upload restriction : Source IP / Token
• ShareX Uploader : Directly integrated into ShareX
• plikSharp : A .NET API client for Plik

Version

1.2.3

Installation

From release

To run plik, it's very simple :

$ wget https://github.com/root-gg/plik/releases/download/1.2.2/plik-1.2.2-linux-64bits.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf plik-1.2.2-linux-64bits.tar.gz
$ cd plik-1.2.2/server
$ ./plikd

Et voilà ! You now have a fully functional instance of plik running on http://127.0.0.1:8080.
You can edit server/plikd.cfg to adapt the configuration to your needs (ports, ssl, ttl, backends params,...)

From root.gg Debian repository

Configure root.gg repository and install server and/or client

wget -O - http://mir.root.gg/gg.key | apt-key add -
echo "deb http://mir.root.gg/ $(lsb_release --codename --short) main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/root.gg.list
apt-get update
apt-get install plikd plik

Edit server configuration at /etc/plikd.cfg and start the server

service plikd start

From sources

To compile plik from sources, you'll need golang and npm installed on your system.

First, get the project and libs via go get :

$ go get github.com/root-gg/plik/server
go/src/github.com/root-gg/plik/server/handlers/misc.go:51: undefined: common.GetBuildInfo <== ignore this warning
$ cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/root-gg/plik/

To build everything and run it :

$ make
$ cd server && ./plikd

To make debian packages :

$ make debs-server debs-client

To make release archives :

$ make releases

Cli client

Plik is shipped with a powerful golang multiplatform cli client (downloadable in web interface) :

Usage:
  plik [options] [FILE] ...

Options:
  -h --help                 Show this help
  -d --debug                Enable debug mode
  -q --quiet                Enable quiet mode
  -o, --oneshot             Enable OneShot ( Each file will be deleted on first download )
  -r, --removable           Enable Removable upload ( Each file can be deleted by anyone at anymoment )
  -S, --stream              Enable Streaming ( It will block until remote user starts downloading )
  -t, --ttl TTL             Time before expiration (Upload will be removed in m|h|d)
  -n, --name NAME           Set file name when piping from STDIN
  --server SERVER           Overrides plik url
  --token TOKEN             Specify an upload token
  --comments COMMENT        Set comments of the upload ( MarkDown compatible )
  -p                        Protect the upload with login and password
  --password PASSWD         Protect the upload with login:password ( if omitted default login is "plik" )
  -y, --yubikey             Protect the upload with a Yubikey OTP
  -a                        Archive upload using default archive params ( see ~/.plikrc )
  --archive MODE            Archive upload using specified archive backend : tar|zip
  --compress MODE           [tar] Compression codec : gzip|bzip2|xz|lzip|lzma|lzop|compress|no
  --archive-options OPTIONS [tar|zip] Additional command line options
  -s                        Encrypt upload usnig default encrypt params ( see ~/.plikrc )
  --not-secure              Do not encrypt upload regardless of ~/.plikrc configurations
  --secure MODE             Archive upload using specified archive backend : openssl|pgp
  --cipher CIPHER           [openssl] Openssl cipher to use ( see openssl help )
  --passphrase PASSPHRASE   [openssl] Passphrase or '-' to be prompted for a passphrase
  --recipient RECIPIENT     [pgp] Set recipient for pgp backend ( example : --recipient Bob )
  --secure-options OPTIONS  [openssl|pgp] Additional command line options
  --update                  Update client
  -v --version              Show client version

For example to create directory tar.gz archive and encrypt it with openssl :

$ plik -a -s mydirectory/
Passphrase : 30ICoKdFeoKaKNdnFf36n0kMH
Upload successfully created : 
    https://127.0.0.1:8080/#/?id=0KfNj6eMb93ilCrl

mydirectory.tar.gz : 15.70 MB 5.92 MB/s

Commands :
curl -s 'https://127.0.0.1:8080/file/0KfNj6eMb93ilCrl/q73tEBEqM04b22GP/mydirectory.tar.gz' | openssl aes-256-cbc -d -pass pass:30ICoKdFeoKaKNdnFf36n0kMH | tar xvf - --gzip

Client configuration and preferences are stored at ~/.plikrc or /etc/plik/plikrc ( overridable with PLIKRC environement variable )

Available data backends

Plik is shipped with multiple data backend for uploaded files and metadata backend for the upload metadata.

• File databackend :

Store uploaded files in a local or mounted file system directory. This is suitable for multiple instance deployment if all instances can share the directory.

• Openstack Swift databackend : http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/

Openstack Swift is a highly available, distributed, eventually consistent object/blob store.

• SeaweedFS databackend : https://github.com/chrislusf/seaweedfs

SeaweedFS is a simple and highly scalable distributed file system.

Available metadata backends

• File metadata backend : (DEPRECATED)

This backend has been deprecated in Plik 1.2 in favor of BoltDB backend. The authentication mechanisms ( User / Tokens ) are NOT implemented in this backend. Migration from file backend to BoltDB backend can be done using the migrate_from_file_to_bolt script.

server/utils/file2bolt --directory server/files --db server/plik.db

This backend save upload metadata as JSON in a .config file in the upload directory. This is only suitable for a single instance deployment as locking append at the process level. Using multiple plik instance with this backend will result in corrupted metadata JSON files. Use mongodb backend instead.

• Bolt metadata backend : https://github.com/boltdb/bolt

This is the successor of the file metadata backend, it store all the metadata in a single bolt.db file. Performance is improved by keeping all metadata in memory to avoid costly filesystem stat operations.
Boltdb also support of atomic transactions that ensure the metadata consistency over time.

Only suitable for a single instance deployment as the Bolt database can only be opened by a single process at a time.

• Mongodb metadata backend : https://www.mongodb.org

Suitable for distributed / High Availability deployment.

Authentication

Plik can authenticate users using Google and/or OVH API. Once authenticated the only call Plik will ever make to those API is to get the user ID, name and email. Plik will never forward any upload data or metadata to any third party.
If source IP address restriction is enabled, user accounts can only be created from trusted IPs. But then authenticated users can upload files without source IP restriction. It is also possible to deny unauthenticated uploads totally.

• Google :

  • You'll need to create a new application in the Google Developper Console
  • You'll be handed a Google API ClientID and a Google API ClientSecret that you'll need to put in the plikd.cfg file.
  • Do not forget to whitelist valid origin and redirect url ( https://yourdomain/auth/google/callback ) for your domain.
  • It is possible to whitelist only one or more email domains.

• OVH :

  • You'll need to create a new application in the OVH API : https://eu.api.ovh.com/createApp/
  • You'll be handed an OVH application key and an OVH application secret key that you'll need to put in the plikd.cfg file.

Once authenticated a user can generate upload tokens that can be specified in the ~/.plikrc file to authenticate the command line client.

Token = "xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"

Security

Plik allow users to upload and serve any content as-is, but hosting untrusted HTML raises some well known security concerns. Plik will try to avoid HTML rendering by overriding Content-Type to "text-plain" instead of "text/html". Also the Content-Security-Policy HTTP header should disable sensible features of most recent browsers like resource loading, xhr requests, iframes,... Along with that it is still strongly advised to serve uploaded files on a separate (sub-)domain to fight against phishing links and to protect Plik's session cookie with the DownloadDomain configuration parameter.

API

Plik server expose a HTTP API to manage uploads and get files :

See the Plik API reference

Docker

Plik comes with a simple Dockerfile that allows you to run it in a container :

See the Plik Docker reference

Plik also comes with some useful scripts to test backends in standalone docker instances :

See the Plik Docker backend testing

FAQ

• Why is stream mode broken in multiple instance deployement ?

Beacause stream mode isn't stateless. As the uploader request will block on one plik instance the downloader request MUST go to the same instance to succeed. The load balancing strategy MUST be aware of this and route stream requests to the same instance by hashing the file id.

Here is an example of how to achieve this using nginx and a little piece of LUA. Make sure your nginx server is built with LUA scripting support. You might want to install the "nginx-extras" Debian package (>1.7.2) with built-in LUA support.

upstream plik {
    server 127.0.0.1:8080;
    server 127.0.0.1:8081;
}

upstream stream {
    server 127.0.0.1:8080;
    server 127.0.0.1:8081;
    hash $hash_key;
}

server {
    listen 9000;

    location / {
        set $upstream "";
        set $hash_key "";
        access_by_lua '
            _,_,file_id = string.find(ngx.var.request_uri, "^/stream/[a-zA-Z0-9]+/([a-zA-Z0-9]+)/.*$")
            if file_id == nil then
                ngx.var.upstream = "plik"
            else
                ngx.var.upstream = "stream"
                ngx.var.hash_key = file_id
            end
        ';
        proxy_pass http://$upstream;
    }
}

• Redirection loops with DownloadDomain enforcement and reverse proxy

Invalid download domain 127.0.0.1:8080, expected plik.root.gg

DownloadDomain check the Host header of the incoming HTTP request, by default reverse proxies like Nginx or Apache mod_proxy does not forward this Header. Check the following configuration directive :

Apache mod_proxy : ProxyPreserveHost On
Nginx : proxy_set_header Host $host;

• I have an error when uploading from client : "Unable to upload file : HTTP error 411 Length Required"

Under nginx < 1.3.9, you must enable HttpChunkin module to allow transfer-encoding "chunked".
You might want to install the "nginx-extras" Debian package with built-in HttpChunkin module.

And add in your server configuration :

chunkin on;
error_page 411 = @my_411_error;
location @my_411_error {
        chunkin_resume;
}

• How to disable nginx buffering ?

By default nginx buffers large HTTP requests and reponses to a temporary file. This behaviour leads to unnecessary disk load and slower transfers. This should be turned off (>1.7.12) for /file and /stream paths. You might also want to increase buffers size.

Detailed documentation : http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_proxy_module.html#proxy_buffering

proxy_buffering off;
proxy_request_buffering off;
proxy_http_version 1.1;
proxy_buffer_size 1M;
proxy_buffers 8 1M;
client_body_buffer_size 1M;

• Why authentication does not work with HTTP connections ?

Plik session cookies have the "secure" flag set, so they can only be transmitted over secure HTTPS connections.

• Build failure "/usr/bin/env: ‘node’: No such file or directory"

Debian users might need to install the nodejs-legacy package.

This package contains a symlink for legacy Node.js code requiring
binary to be /usr/bin/node (not /usr/bin/nodejs as provided in Debian).

• How to take and upload screenshots like a boss ?

alias pshot="scrot -s -e 'plik -q \$f | xclip ; xclip -o ; rm \$f'"

Requires you to have plik, scrot and xclip installed in your $PATH.
scrot -s allow you to "Interactively select a window or rectangle with the mouse" then Plik will upload the screenshot and the url will be directly copied to your clipboard and displayed by xclip. The screenshot is then removed of your home directory to avoid garbage.

• How to contribute to the project ?

Contributions are welcome, feel free to open issues and/or submit pull requests. Please run/update the test suite using the makefile test target.