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    Copyparty, turn almost any device into a file server

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    Copyparty, turn almost any device into a file server

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    Copyparty, turn almost any device into a file server

    💾🎉 copyparty

    turn almost any device into a file server with resumable uploads/downloads using any web browser

    👉 Get started! or visit the read-only demo server 👀 running on a nuc in my basement

    📷 screenshots: browser // upload // unpost // thumbnails // search // fsearch // zip-DL // md-viewer

    🎬 videos: upload // cli-upload // race-the-beam

    made in Norway 🇳🇴

    readme toc

    quickstart

    just run copyparty-sfx.py — that’s it! 🎉

    enable thumbnails (images/audio/video), media indexing, and audio transcoding by installing some recommended deps:

    • Alpine: apk add py3-pillow ffmpeg
    • Debian: apt install --no-install-recommends python3-pil ffmpeg
    • Fedora: rpmfusion + dnf install python3-pillow ffmpeg --allowerasing
    • FreeBSD: pkg install py39-sqlite3 py39-pillow ffmpeg
    • MacOS: port install py-Pillow ffmpeg
    • MacOS (alternative): brew install pillow ffmpeg
    • Windows: python -m pip install --user -U Pillow
      • install python and ffmpeg manually; do not use winget or Microsoft Store (it breaks $PATH)
      • copyparty.exe comes with Pillow and only needs ffmpeg for mediatags/videothumbs
    • see optional dependencies to enable even more features

    running copyparty without arguments (for example doubleclicking it on Windows) will give everyone read/write access to the current folder; you may want accounts and volumes

    or see some usage examples for inspiration, or the complete windows example

    some recommended options:

    • -e2dsa enables general file indexing
    • -e2ts enables audio metadata indexing (needs either FFprobe or Mutagen)
    • -v /mnt/music:/music:r:rw,foo -a foo:bar shares /mnt/music as /music, readable by anyone, and read-write for user foo, password bar
      • replace :r:rw,foo with :r,foo to only make the folder readable by foo and nobody else
      • see accounts and volumes (or --help-accounts) for the syntax and other permissions

    at home

    make it accessible over the internet by starting a cloudflare quicktunnel like so:

    first download cloudflared and then start the tunnel with cloudflared tunnel --url http://127.0.0.1:3923

    as the tunnel starts, it will show a URL which you can share to let anyone browse your stash or upload files to you

    but if you have a domain, then you probably want to skip the random autogenerated URL and instead make a permanent cloudflare tunnel

    since people will be connecting through cloudflare, run copyparty with --xff-hdr cf-connecting-ip to detect client IPs correctly

    on servers

    you may also want these, especially on servers:

    and remember to open the ports you want; here’s a complete example including every feature copyparty has to offer:

    firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port={80,443,3921,3923,3945,3990}/tcp  # --zone=libvirt
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=12000-12099/tcp  # --zone=libvirt
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port={69,1900,3969,5353}/udp  # --zone=libvirt
firewall-cmd --reload

    (69:tftp, 1900:ssdp, 3921:ftp, 3923:http/https, 3945:smb, 3969:tftp, 3990:ftps, 5353:mdns, 12000:passive-ftp)

    features

    also see comparison to similar software

    PS: something missing? post any crazy ideas you’ve got as a feature request or discussion 🤙

    testimonials

    small collection of user feedback

    good enough, surprisingly correct, certified good software, just works, why, wow this is better than nextcloud

    • UI просто ужасно. Если буду описывать детально не смогу удержаться в рамках приличий

    motivations

    project goals / philosophy

    • inverse linux philosophy — do all the things, and do an okay job
      • quick drop-in service to get a lot of features in a pinch
      • some of the alternatives might be a better fit for you
    • run anywhere, support everything
      • as many web-browsers and python versions as possible
        • every browser should at least be able to browse, download, upload files
        • be a good emergency solution for transferring stuff between ancient boxes
      • minimal dependencies
        • but optional dependencies adding bonus-features are ok
        • everything being plaintext makes it possible to proofread for malicious code
      • no preparations / setup necessary, just run the sfx (which is also plaintext)
    • adaptable, malleable, hackable
      • no build steps; modify the js/python without needing node.js or anything like that

    becoming rich is specifically not a motivation, but if you wanna donate then see my github profile regarding donations for my FOSS stuff in general (also THANKS!)

    notes

    general notes:

    • paper-printing is affected by dark/light-mode! use lightmode for color, darkmode for grayscale
      • because no browsers currently implement the media-query to do this properly orz

    browser-specific:

    • iPhone/iPad: use Firefox to download files
    • Android-Chrome: increase “parallel uploads” for higher speed (android bug)
    • Android-Firefox: takes a while to select files (their fix for ☝️)
    • Desktop-Firefox: may use gigabytes of RAM if your files are massive seems to be OK now
    • Desktop-Firefox: may stop you from unplugging USB flashdrives until you visit about:memory and click Minimize memory usage

    server-os-specific:

    • RHEL8 / Rocky8: you can run copyparty using /usr/libexec/platform-python

    server notes:

    • pypy is supported but regular cpython is faster if you enable the database

    bugs

    roughly sorted by chance of encounter

    • general:

      • --th-ff-jpg may fix video thumbnails on some FFmpeg versions (macos, some linux)
      • --th-ff-swr may fix audio thumbnails on some FFmpeg versions
      • if the up2k.db (filesystem index) is on a samba-share or network disk, you’ll get unpredictable behavior if the share is disconnected for a bit
        • use --hist or the hist volflag (-v [...]:c,hist=/tmp/foo) to place the db and thumbnails on a local disk instead
        • or, if you only want to move the db (and not the thumbnails), then use --dbpath or the dbpath volflag
      • all volumes must exist / be available on startup; up2k (mtp especially) gets funky otherwise
      • probably more, pls let me know

    • python 3.4 and older (including 2.7):

    • python 2.7 on Windows:

      • cannot index non-ascii filenames with -e2d
      • cannot handle filenames with mojibake

    if you have a new exciting bug to share, see reporting bugs

    not my bugs

    same order here too

    • Chrome issue 1317069 — if you try to upload a folder which contains symlinks by dragging it into the browser, the symlinked files will not get uploaded

    • Chrome issue 1352210 — plaintext http may be faster at filehashing than https (but also extremely CPU-intensive)

    • Chrome issue 383568268 — filereaders in webworkers can OOM / crash the browser-tab

      • copyparty has a workaround which seems to work well enough

    • Firefox issue 1790500 — entire browser can crash after uploading ~4000 small files

    • Android: music playback randomly stops due to battery usage settings

    • iPhones: the volume control doesn’t work because apple doesn’t want it to

      • AudioContext will probably never be a viable workaround as apple introduces new issues faster than they fix current ones

    • iPhones: music volume goes on a rollercoaster during song changes

      • nothing I can do about it because AudioContext is still broken in safari

    • iPhones: the preload feature (in the media-player-options tab) can cause a tiny audio glitch 20sec before the end of each song, but disabling it may cause worse iOS bugs to appear instead

      • just a hunch, but disabling preloading may cause playback to stop entirely, or possibly mess with bluetooth speakers
      • tried to add a tooltip regarding this but looks like apple broke my tooltips

    • iPhones: preloaded awo files make safari log MEDIA_ERR_NETWORK errors as playback starts, but the song plays just fine so eh whatever

      • awo, opus-weba, is apple’s new take on opus support, replacing opus-caf which was technically limited to cbr opus

    • iPhones: preloading another awo file may cause playback to stop

      • can be somewhat mitigated with mp.au.play() in mp.onpreload but that can hit a race condition in safari that starts playing the same audio object twice in parallel…

    • Windows: folders cannot be accessed if the name ends with .

      • python or windows bug

    • Windows: msys2-python 3.8.6 occasionally throws RuntimeError: release unlocked lock when leaving a scoped mutex in up2k

      • this is an msys2 bug, the regular windows edition of python is fine

    • VirtualBox: sqlite throws Disk I/O Error when running in a VM and the up2k database is in a vboxsf

      • use --hist or the hist volflag (-v [...]:c,hist=/tmp/foo) to place the db and thumbnails inside the vm instead
        • or, if you only want to move the db (and not the thumbnails), then use --dbpath or the dbpath volflag
      • also happens on mergerfs, so put the db elsewhere

    • Ubuntu: dragging files from certain folders into firefox or chrome is impossible

      • due to snap security policies — see snap connections firefox for the allowlist, removable-media permits all of /mnt and /media apparently

    breaking changes

    upgrade notes

    • 1.9.16 (2023-11-04):
      • --stats/prometheus: cpp_bans renamed to cpp_active_bans, and that + cpp_uptime are gauges
    • 1.6.0 (2023-01-29):
      • http-api: delete/move is now POST instead of GET
      • everything other than GET and HEAD must pass cors validation
    • 1.5.0 (2022-12-03): new chunksize formula for files larger than 128 GiB
      • users: upgrade to the latest cli uploader if you use that
      • devs: update third-party up2k clients (if those even exist)

    FAQ

    “frequently” asked questions

    • CopyParty?

      • nope! the name is either copyparty (all-lowercase) or Copyparty — it’s one word after all :>

    • can I change the 🌲 spinning pine-tree loading animation?

    • is it possible to block read-access to folders unless you know the exact URL for a particular file inside?

      • yes, using the g permission, see the examples there
      • you can also do this with linux filesystem permissions; chmod 111 music will make it possible to access files and folders inside the music folder but not list the immediate contents — also works with other software, not just copyparty

    • can I link someone to a password-protected volume/file by including the password in the URL?

      • yes, by adding ?pw=hunter2 to the end; replace ? with & if there are parameters in the URL already, meaning it contains a ? near the end

    • how do I stop .hist folders from appearing everywhere on my HDD?

      • by default, a .hist folder is created inside each volume for the filesystem index, thumbnails, audio transcodes, and markdown document history. Use the --hist global-option or the hist volflag to move it somewhere else; see database location

    • can I make copyparty download a file to my server if I give it a URL?

    • firefox refuses to connect over https, saying “Secure Connection Failed” or “SEC_ERROR_BAD_SIGNATURE”, but the usual button to “Accept the Risk and Continue” is not shown

      • firefox has corrupted its certstore; fix this by exiting firefox, then find and delete the file named cert9.db somewhere in your firefox profile folder

    • the server keeps saying thank you for playing when I try to access the website

      • you’ve gotten banned for malicious traffic! if this happens by mistake, and you’re running a reverse-proxy and/or something like cloudflare, see real-ip on how to fix this

    • copyparty seems to think I am using http, even though the URL is https

      • your reverse-proxy is not sending the X-Forwarded-Proto: https header; this could be because your reverse-proxy itself is confused. Ensure that none of the intermediates (such as cloudflare) are terminating https before the traffic hits your entrypoint

    • thumbnails are broken (you get a colorful square which says the filetype instead)

      • you need to install FFmpeg or Pillow; see thumbnails

    • thumbnails are broken (some images appear, but other files just get a blank box, and/or the broken-image placeholder)

      • probably due to a reverse-proxy messing with the request URLs and stripping the query parameters (?th=w), so check your URL rewrite rules
      • could also be due to incorrect caching settings in reverse-proxies and/or CDNs, so make sure that nothing is set to ignore the query string
      • could also be due to misbehaving privacy-related browser extensions, so try to disable those

    • i want to learn python and/or programming and am considering looking at the copyparty source code in that occasion

      •  _|  _      __   _  _|_
(_| (_)     | | (_)  |_

    accounts and volumes

    per-folder, per-user permissions – if your setup is getting complex, consider making a config file instead of using arguments

    • much easier to manage, and you can modify the config at runtime with systemctl reload copyparty or more conveniently using the [reload cfg] button in the control-panel (if the user has a/admin in any volume)
      • changes to the [global] config section requires a restart to take effect

    a quick summary can be seen using --help-accounts

    configuring accounts/volumes with arguments:

    • -a usr:pwd adds account usr with password pwd
    • -v .::r adds current-folder . as the webroot, readable by anyone
      • the syntax is -v src:dst:perm:perm:... so local-path, url-path, and one or more permissions to set
      • granting the same permissions to multiple accounts:
        -v .::r,usr1,usr2:rw,usr3,usr4 = usr1/2 read-only, 3/4 read-write

    permissions:

    • r (read): browse folder contents, download files, download as zip/tar, see filekeys/dirkeys
    • w (write): upload files, move/copy files into this folder
    • m (move): move files/folders from this folder
    • d (delete): delete files/folders
    • . (dots): user can ask to show dotfiles in directory listings
    • g (get): only download files, cannot see folder contents or zip/tar
    • G (upget): same as g except uploaders get to see their own filekeys (see fk in examples below)
    • h (html): same as g except folders return their index.html, and filekeys are not necessary for index.html
    • a (admin): can see upload time, uploader IPs, config-reload
    • A (“all”): same as rwmda. (read/write/move/delete/admin/dotfiles)

    examples:

    • add accounts named u1, u2, u3 with passwords p1, p2, p3: -a u1:p1 -a u2:p2 -a u3:p3
    • make folder /srv the root of the filesystem, read-only by anyone: -v /srv::r
    • make folder /mnt/music available at /music, read-only for u1 and u2, read-write for u3: -v /mnt/music:music:r,u1,u2:rw,u3
      • unauthorized users accessing the webroot can see that the music folder exists, but cannot open it
    • make folder /mnt/incoming available at /inc, write-only for u1, read-move for u2: -v /mnt/incoming:inc:w,u1:rm,u2
      • unauthorized users accessing the webroot can see that the inc folder exists, but cannot open it
      • u1 can open the inc folder, but cannot see the contents, only upload new files to it
      • u2 can browse it and move files from /inc into any folder where u2 has write-access
    • make folder /mnt/ss available at /i, read-write for u1, get-only for everyone else, and enable filekeys: -v /mnt/ss:i:rw,u1:g:c,fk=4
      • c,fk=4 sets the fk (filekey) volflag to 4, meaning each file gets a 4-character accesskey
      • u1 can upload files, browse the folder, and see the generated filekeys
      • other users cannot browse the folder, but can access the files if they have the full file URL with the filekey
      • replacing the g permission with wg would let anonymous users upload files, but not see the required filekey to access it
      • replacing the g permission with wG would let anonymous users upload files, receiving a working direct link in return

    anyone trying to bruteforce a password gets banned according to --ban-pw; default is 24h ban for 9 failed attempts in 1 hour

    and if you want to use config files instead of commandline args (good!) then here’s the same examples as a configfile; save it as foobar.conf and use it like this: python copyparty-sfx.py -c foobar.conf

    [accounts]
  u1: p1  # create account "u1" with password "p1"
  u2: p2  #  (note that comments must have
  u3: p3  #   two spaces before the # sign)

[/]     # this URL will be mapped to...
  /srv  # ...this folder on the server filesystem
  accs:
    r: *  # read-only for everyone, no account necessary

[/music]       # create another volume at this URL,
  /mnt/music   # which is mapped to this folder
  accs:
    r: u1, u2  # only these accounts can read,
    rw: u3     # and only u3 can read-write

[/inc]
  /mnt/incoming
  accs:
    w: u1   # u1 can upload but not see/download any files,
    rm: u2  # u2 can browse + move files out of this volume

[/i]
  /mnt/ss
  accs:
    rw: u1  # u1 can read-write,
    g: *    # everyone can access files if they know the URL
  flags:
    fk: 4   # each file URL will have a 4-character password

    shadowing

    hiding specific subfolders by mounting another volume on top of them

    for example -v /mnt::r -v /var/empty:web/certs:r mounts the server folder /mnt as the webroot, but another volume is mounted at /web/certs — so visitors can only see the contents of /mnt and /mnt/web (at URLs / and /web), but not /mnt/web/certs because URL /web/certs is mapped to /var/empty

    the example config file right above this section may explain this better; the first volume / is mapped to /srv which means http://127.0.0.1:3923/music would try to read /srv/music on the server filesystem, but since there’s another volume at /music mapped to /mnt/music then it’ll go to /mnt/music instead

    dotfiles

    unix-style hidden files/folders by starting the name with a dot

    anyone can access these if they know the name, but they normally don’t appear in directory listings

    a client can request to see dotfiles in directory listings if global option -ed is specified, or the volume has volflag dots, or the user has permission .

    dotfiles do not appear in search results unless one of the above is true, and the global option / volflag dotsrch is set

    even if user has permission to see dotfiles, they are default-hidden unless --see-dots is set, and/or user has enabled the dotfiles option in the settings tab

    config file example, where the same permission to see dotfiles is given in two different ways just for reference:

    [/foo]
  /srv/foo
  accs:
    r.: ed   # user "ed" has read-access + dot-access in this volume;
             # dotfiles are visible in listings, but not in searches
  flags:
    dotsrch  # dotfiles will now appear in search results too
    dots     # another way to let everyone see dotfiles in this vol

    the browser

    accessing a copyparty server using a web-browser

    tabs

    the main tabs in the ui

    • [🔎] search by size, date, path/name, mp3-tags …
    • [🧯] unpost: undo/delete accidental uploads
    • [🚀] and [🎈] are the uploaders
    • [📂] mkdir: create directories
    • [📝] new-md: create a new markdown document
    • [📟] send-msg: either to server-log or into textfiles if --urlform save
    • [🎺] audio-player config options
    • [⚙️] general client config options

    hotkeys

    the browser has the following hotkeys (always qwerty)

    • ? show hotkeys help
    • B toggle breadcrumbs / navpane
    • I/K prev/next folder
    • M parent folder (or unexpand current)
    • V toggle folders / textfiles in the navpane
    • G toggle list / grid view — same as 田 bottom-right
    • T toggle thumbnails / icons
    • ESC close various things
    • ctrl-K delete selected files/folders
    • ctrl-X cut selected files/folders
    • ctrl-C copy selected files/folders to clipboard
    • ctrl-V paste (move/copy)
    • Y download selected files
    • F2 rename selected file/folder
    • when a file/folder is selected (in not-grid-view):
      • Up/Down move cursor
      • shift+Up/Down select and move cursor
      • ctrl+Up/Down move cursor and scroll viewport
      • Space toggle file selection
      • Ctrl-A toggle select all
    • when a textfile is open:
      • I/K prev/next textfile
      • S toggle selection of open file
      • M close textfile
    • when playing audio:
      • J/L prev/next song
      • U/O skip 10sec back/forward
      • 0..9 jump to 0%..90%
      • P play/pause (also starts playing the folder)
      • Y download file
    • when viewing images / playing videos:
      • J/L, Left/Right prev/next file
      • Home/End first/last file
      • F toggle fullscreen
      • S toggle selection
      • R rotate clockwise (shift=ccw)
      • Y download file
      • Esc close viewer
      • videos:
        • U/O skip 10sec back/forward
        • 0..9 jump to 0%..90%
        • P/K/Space play/pause
        • M mute
        • C continue playing next video
        • V loop entire file
        • [ loop range (start)
        • ] loop range (end)
    • when the navpane is open:
      • A/D adjust tree width
    • in the grid view:
      • S toggle multiselect
      • shift+A/D zoom
    • in the markdown editor:
      • ^s save
      • ^h header
      • ^k autoformat table
      • ^u jump to next unicode character
      • ^e toggle editor / preview
      • ^up, ^down jump paragraphs

    navpane

    switching between breadcrumbs or navpane

    click the 🌲 or pressing the B hotkey to toggle between breadcrumbs path (default), or a navpane (tree-browser sidebar thing)

    • [+] and [-] (or hotkeys A/D) adjust the size
    • [🎯] jumps to the currently open folder
    • [📃] toggles between showing folders and textfiles
    • [📌] shows the name of all parent folders in a docked panel
    • [a] toggles automatic widening as you go deeper
    • [↵] toggles wordwrap
    • [👀] show full name on hover (if wordwrap is off)

    thumbnails

    press g or 田 to toggle grid-view instead of the file listing and t toggles icons / thumbnails

    • can be made default globally with --grid or per-volume with volflag grid
    • enable by adding ?imgs to a link, or disable with ?imgs=0

    it does static images with Pillow / pyvips / FFmpeg, and uses FFmpeg for video files, so you may want to --no-thumb or maybe just --no-vthumb depending on how dangerous your users are

    • pyvips is 3x faster than Pillow, Pillow is 3x faster than FFmpeg
    • disable thumbnails for specific volumes with volflag dthumb for all, or dvthumb / dathumb / dithumb for video/audio/images only
    • for installing FFmpeg on windows, see optional dependencies

    audio files are converted into spectrograms using FFmpeg unless you --no-athumb (and some FFmpeg builds may need --th-ff-swr)

    images with the following names (see --th-covers) become the thumbnail of the folder they’re in: folder.png, folder.jpg, cover.png, cover.jpg

    • the order is significant, so if both cover.png and folder.jpg exist in a folder, it will pick the first matching --th-covers entry (folder.jpg)
    • and, if you enable file indexing, it will also try those names as dotfiles (.folder.jpg and so), and then fallback on the first picture in the folder (if it has any pictures at all)

    enabling multiselect lets you click files to select them, and then shift-click another file for range-select

    • multiselect is mostly intended for phones/tablets, but the sel option in the [⚙️] settings tab is better suited for desktop use, allowing selection by CTRL-clicking and range-selection with SHIFT-click, all without affecting regular clicking
      • the sel option can be made default globally with --gsel or per-volume with volflag gsel

    to show /icons/exe.png and /icons/elf.gif as the thumbnail for all .exe and .elf files respectively, do this: --ext-th=exe=/icons/exe.png --ext-th=elf=/icons/elf.gif

    • optionally as separate volflags for each mapping; see config file example below
    • the supported image formats are jpg, png, gif, webp, ico
      • be careful with svg; chrome will crash if you have too many unique svg files showing on the same page (the limit is 250 or so) — showing the same handful of svg files thousands of times is ok however

    config file example:

    [global]
  no-thumb   # disable ALL thumbnails and audio transcoding
  no-vthumb  # only disable video thumbnails

[/music]
  /mnt/nas/music
  accs:
    r: *     # everyone can read
  flags:
    dthumb   # disable ALL thumbnails and audio transcoding
    dvthumb  # only disable video thumbnails
    ext-th:  exe=/ico/exe.png  # /ico/exe.png is the thumbnail of *.exe
    ext-th:  elf=/ico/elf.gif  # ...and /ico/elf.gif is used for *.elf
    th-covers:  folder.png,folder.jpg,cover.png,cover.jpg  # the default

    zip downloads

    download folders (or file selections) as zip or tar files

    select which type of archive you want in the [⚙️] config tab:

    name url-suffix description
    tar ?tar plain gnutar, works great with curl | tar -xv
    pax ?tar=pax pax-format tar, futureproof, not as fast
    tgz ?tar=gz gzip compressed gnu-tar (slow), for curl | tar -xvz
    txz ?tar=xz gnu-tar with xz / lzma compression (v.slow)
    zip ?zip works everywhere, glitchy filenames on win7 and older
    zip_dos ?zip=dos traditional cp437 (no unicode) to fix glitchy filenames
    zip_crc ?zip=crc cp437 with crc32 computed early for truly ancient software

    • gzip default level is 3 (0=fast, 9=best), change with ?tar=gz:9
    • xz default level is 1 (0=fast, 9=best), change with ?tar=xz:9
    • bz2 default level is 2 (1=fast, 9=best), change with ?tar=bz2:9
    • hidden files (dotfiles) are excluded unless account is allowed to list them
      • up2k.db and dir.txt is always excluded
    • bsdtar supports streaming unzipping: curl foo?zip | bsdtar -xv
      • good, because copyparty’s zip is faster than tar on small files
        • but ?tar is better for large files, especially if the total exceeds 4 GiB
    • zip_crc will take longer to download since the server has to read each file twice
      • this is only to support MS-DOS PKZIP v2.04g (october 1993) and older
        • how are you accessing copyparty actually

    you can also zip a selection of files or folders by clicking them in the browser, that brings up a selection editor and zip button in the bottom right

    cool trick: download a folder by appending url-params ?tar&opus or ?tar&mp3 to transcode all audio files (except aac|m4a|mp3|ogg|opus|wma) to opus/mp3 before they’re added to the archive

    • super useful if you’re 5 minutes away from takeoff and realize you don’t have any music on your phone but your server only has flac files and downloading those will burn through all your data + there wouldn’t be enough time anyways
    • and url-params &j / &w produce jpeg/webm thumbnails/spectrograms instead of the original audio/video/images (&p for audio waveforms)
      • can also be used to pregenerate thumbnails; combine with --th-maxage=9999999 or --th-clean=0

    uploading

    drag files/folders into the web-browser to upload

    dragdrop is the recommended way, but you may also:

    when uploading files through dragdrop or CTRL-V, this initiates an upload using up2k; there are two browser-based uploaders available:

    • [🎈] bup, the basic uploader, supports almost every browser since netscape 4.0
    • [🚀] up2k, the good / fancy one

    NB: you can undo/delete your own uploads with [🧯] unpost (and this is also where you abort unfinished uploads, but you have to refresh the page first)

    up2k has several advantages:

    • you can drop folders into the browser (files are added recursively)
    • files are processed in chunks, and each chunk is checksummed
      • uploads autoresume if they are interrupted by network issues
      • uploads resume if you reboot your browser or pc, just upload the same files again
      • server detects any corruption; the client reuploads affected chunks
      • the client doesn’t upload anything that already exists on the server
      • no filesize limit, even when a proxy limits the request size (for example Cloudflare)
    • much higher speeds than ftp/scp/tarpipe on some internet connections (mainly american ones) thanks to parallel connections
    • the last-modified timestamp of the file is preserved

    it is perfectly safe to restart / upgrade copyparty while someone is uploading to it!
    all known up2k clients will resume just fine 💪

    see up2k for details on how it works, or watch a demo video

    protip: you can avoid scaring away users with contrib/plugins/minimal-up2k.js which makes it look much simpler

    protip: if you enable favicon in the [⚙️] settings tab (by typing something into the textbox), the icon in the browser tab will indicate upload progress — also, the [🔔] and/or [🔊] switches enable visible and/or audible notifications on upload completion

    the up2k UI is the epitome of polished intuitive experiences:

    • “parallel uploads” specifies how many chunks to upload at the same time
    • [🏃] analysis of other files should continue while one is uploading
    • [🥔] shows a simpler UI for faster uploads from slow devices
    • [🛡️] decides when to overwrite existing files on the server
      • 🛡️ = never (generate a new filename instead)
      • 🕒 = overwrite if the server-file is older
      • ♻️ = always overwrite if the files are different
    • [🎲] generate random filenames during upload
    • [🔎] switch between upload and file-search mode
      • ignore [🔎] if you add files by dragging them into the browser

    and then theres the tabs below it,

    • [ok] is the files which completed successfully
    • [ng] is the ones that failed / got rejected (already exists, …)
    • [done] shows a combined list of [ok] and [ng], chronological order
    • [busy] files which are currently hashing, pending-upload, or uploading
      • plus up to 3 entries each from [done] and [que] for context
    • [que] is all the files that are still queued

    note that since up2k has to read each file twice, [🎈] bup can theoretically be up to 2x faster in some extreme cases (files bigger than your ram, combined with an internet connection faster than the read-speed of your HDD, or if you’re uploading from a cuo2duo)

    if you are resuming a massive upload and want to skip hashing the files which already finished, you can enable turbo in the [⚙️] config tab, but please read the tooltip on that button

    if the server is behind a proxy which imposes a request-size limit, you can configure up2k to sneak below the limit with server-option --u2sz (the default is 96 MiB to support Cloudflare)

    if you want to replace existing files on the server with new uploads by default, run with --u2ow 2 (only works if users have the delete-permission, and can still be disabled with 🛡️ in the UI)

    file-search

    dropping files into the browser also lets you see if they exist on the server

    when you drag/drop files into the browser, you will see two dropzones: Upload and Search

    on a phone? toggle the [🔎] switch green before tapping the big yellow Search button to select your files

    the files will be hashed on the client-side, and each hash is sent to the server, which checks if that file exists somewhere

    files go into [ok] if they exist (and you get a link to where it is), otherwise they land in [ng]

    • the main reason filesearch is combined with the uploader is cause the code was too spaghetti to separate it out somewhere else, this is no longer the case but now i’ve warmed up to the idea too much

    unpost

    undo/delete accidental uploads using the [🧯] tab in the UI

    you can unpost even if you don’t have regular move/delete access, however only for files uploaded within the past --unpost seconds (default 12 hours) and the server must be running with -e2d

    config file example:

    [global]
  e2d            # enable up2k database (remember uploads)
  unpost: 43200  # 12 hours (default)

    self-destruct

    uploads can be given a lifetime, after which they expire / self-destruct

    the feature must be enabled per-volume with the lifetime upload rule which sets the upper limit for how long a file gets to stay on the server

    clients can specify a shorter expiration time using the up2k ui — the relevant options become visible upon navigating into a folder with lifetimes enabled — or by using the life upload modifier

    specifying a custom expiration time client-side will affect the timespan in which unposts are permitted, so keep an eye on the estimates in the up2k ui

    race the beam

    download files while they’re still uploading (demo video) — it’s almost like peer-to-peer

    requires the file to be uploaded using up2k (which is the default drag-and-drop uploader), alternatively the command-line program

    incoming files

    the control-panel shows the ETA for all incoming files , but only for files being uploaded into volumes where you have read-access

    file manager

    cut/paste, rename, and delete files/folders (if you have permission)

    file selection: click somewhere on the line (not the link itself), then:

    • space to toggle

    • up/down to move

    • shift-up/down to move-and-select

    • ctrl-shift-up/down to also scroll

    • shift-click another line for range-select

    • cut: select some files and ctrl-x

    • copy: select some files and ctrl-c

    • paste: ctrl-v in another folder

    • rename: F2

    you can copy/move files across browser tabs (cut/copy in one tab, paste in another)

    shares

    share a file or folder by creating a temporary link

    when enabled in the server settings (--shr), click the bottom-right share button to share the folder you’re currently in, or alternatively:

    • select a folder first to share that folder instead
    • select one or more files to share only those files

    this feature was made with identity providers in mind — configure your reverseproxy to skip the IdP’s access-control for a given URL prefix and use that to safely share specific files/folders sans the usual auth checks

    when creating a share, the creator can choose any of the following options:

    • password-protection
    • expire after a certain time; 0 or blank means infinite
    • allow visitors to upload (if the user who creates the share has write-access)

    semi-intentional limitations:

    • cleanup of expired shares only works when global option e2d is set, and/or at least one volume on the server has volflag e2d
    • only folders from the same volume are shared; if you are sharing a folder which contains other volumes, then the contents of those volumes will not be available
    • if you change password hashing settings after creating a password-protected share, then that share will stop working
    • related to IdP volumes being forgotten on shutdown, any shares pointing into a user’s IdP volume will be unavailable until that user makes their first request after a restart
    • no option to “delete after first access” because tricky
      • when linking something to discord (for example) it’ll get accessed by their scraper and that would count as a hit
      • browsers wouldn’t be able to resume a broken download unless the requester’s IP gets allowlisted for X minutes (ref. tricky)

    specify --shr /foobar to enable this feature; a toplevel virtual folder named foobar is then created, and that’s where all the shares will be served from

    • you can name it whatever, foobar is just an example
    • if you’re using config files, put shr: /foobar inside the [global] section instead

    users can delete their own shares in the controlpanel, and a list of privileged users (--shr-adm) are allowed to see and/or delet any share on the server

    after a share has expired, it remains visible in the controlpanel for --shr-rt minutes (default is 1 day), and the owner can revive it by extending the expiration time there

    security note: using this feature does not mean that you can skip the accounts and volumes section — you still need to restrict access to volumes that you do not intend to share with unauthenticated users! it is not sufficient to use rules in the reverseproxy to restrict access to just the /share folder.

    batch rename

    select some files and press F2 to bring up the rename UI

    quick explanation of the buttons,

    • [✅ apply rename] confirms and begins renaming
    • [❌ cancel] aborts and closes the rename window
    • [↺ reset] reverts any filename changes back to the original name
    • [decode] does a URL-decode on the filename, fixing stuff like & and %20
    • [advanced] toggles advanced mode

    advanced mode: rename files based on rules to decide the new names, based on the original name (regex), or based on the tags collected from the file (artist/title/…), or a mix of both

    in advanced mode,

    • [case] toggles case-sensitive regex
    • regex is the regex pattern to apply to the original filename; any files which don’t match will be skipped
    • format is the new filename, taking values from regex capturing groups and/or from file tags
      • very loosely based on foobar2000 syntax
    • presets lets you save rename rules for later

    available functions:

    • $lpad(text, length, pad_char)
    • $rpad(text, length, pad_char)

    so,

    say you have a file named meganeko - Eclipse - 07 Sirius A.mp3 (absolutely fantastic album btw) and the tags are: Album:Eclipse, Artist:meganeko, Title:Sirius A, tn:7

    you could use just regex to rename it:

    • regex = (.*) - (.*) - ([0-9]{2}) (.*)
    • format = (3). (1) - (4)
    • output = 07. meganeko - Sirius A.mp3

    or you could use just tags:

    • format = $lpad((tn),2,0). (artist) - (title).(ext)
    • output = 7. meganeko - Sirius A.mp3

    or a mix of both:

    • regex = - ([0-9]{2})
    • format = (1). (artist) - (title).(ext)
    • output = 07. meganeko - Sirius A.mp3

    the metadata keys you can use in the format field are the ones in the file-browser table header (whatever is collected with -mte and -mtp)

    rss feeds

    monitor a folder with your RSS reader , optionally recursive

    must be enabled per-volume with volflag rss or globally with --rss

    the feed includes itunes metadata for use with podcast readers such as AntennaPod

    a feed example: https://cd.ocv.me/a/d2/d22/?rss&fext=mp3

    url parameters:

    • pw=hunter2 for password auth
    • recursive to also include subfolders
    • title=foo changes the feed title (default: folder name)
    • fext=mp3,opus only include mp3 and opus files (default: all)
    • nf=30 only show the first 30 results (default: 250)
    • sort=m sort by mtime (file last-modified), newest first (default)
      • u = upload-time; NOTE: non-uploaded files have upload-time 0
      • n = filename
      • a = filesize
      • uppercase = reverse-sort; M = oldest file first

    recent uploads

    list all recent uploads by clicking “show recent uploads” in the controlpanel

    will show uploader IP and upload-time if the visitor has the admin permission

    • global-option --ups-when makes upload-time visible to all users, and not just admins

    • global-option --ups-who (volflag ups_who) specifies who gets access (0=nobody, 1=admins, 2=everyone), default=2

    note that the 🧯 unpost feature is better suited for viewing your own recent uploads, as it includes the option to undo/delete them

    config file example:

    [global]
  ups-when    # everyone can see upload times
  ups-who: 1  # but only admins can see the list,
              # so ups-when doesn't take effect

    media player

    plays almost every audio format there is (if the server has FFmpeg installed for on-demand transcoding)

    the following audio formats are usually always playable, even without FFmpeg: aac|flac|m4a|mp3|ogg|opus|wav

    some hilights:

    • OS integration; control playback from your phone’s lockscreen (windows // iOS // android)
    • shows the audio waveform in the seekbar
    • not perfectly gapless but can get really close (see settings + eq below); good enough to enjoy gapless albums as intended
    • videos can be played as audio, without wasting bandwidth on the video

    click the play link next to an audio file, or copy the link target to share it (optionally with a timestamp to start playing from, like that example does)

    open the [🎺] media-player-settings tab to configure it,

    • “switches”:
      • [🔁] repeats one single song forever
      • [🔀] shuffles the files inside each folder
      • [preload] starts loading the next track when it’s about to end, reduces the silence between songs
      • [full] does a full preload by downloading the entire next file; good for unreliable connections, bad for slow connections
      • [~s] toggles the seekbar waveform display
      • [/np] enables buttons to copy the now-playing info as an irc message
      • [📻] enables buttons to create an m3u playlist with the selected songs
      • [os-ctl] makes it possible to control audio playback from the lockscreen of your device (enables mediasession)
      • [seek] allows seeking with lockscreen controls (buggy on some devices)
      • [art] shows album art on the lockscreen
      • [🎯] keeps the playing song scrolled into view (good when using the player as a taskbar dock)
      • [⟎] shrinks the playback controls
    • “buttons”:
      • [uncache] may fix songs that won’t play correctly due to bad files in browser cache
    • “at end of folder”:
      • [loop] keeps looping the folder
      • [next] plays into the next folder
    • “transcode”:
      • [flac] converts flac and wav files into opus (if supported by browser) or mp3
      • [aac] converts aac and m4a files into opus (if supported by browser) or mp3
      • [oth] converts all other known formats into opus (if supported by browser) or mp3
        • aac|ac3|aif|aiff|alac|alaw|amr|ape|au|dfpwm|dts|flac|gsm|it|m4a|mo3|mod|mp2|mp3|mpc|mptm|mt2|mulaw|ogg|okt|opus|ra|s3m|tak|tta|ulaw|wav|wma|wv|xm|xpk
    • “transcode to”:
      • [opus] produces an opus whenever transcoding is necessary (the best choice on Android and PCs)
      • [awo] is opus in a weba file, good for iPhones (iOS 17.5 and newer) but Apple is still fixing some state-confusion bugs as of iOS 18.2.1
      • [caf] is opus in a caf file, good for iPhones (iOS 11 through 17), technically unsupported by Apple but works for the most part
      • [mp3] — the myth, the legend, the undying master of mediocre sound quality that definitely works everywhere
    • “tint” reduces the contrast of the playback bar

    playlists

    create and play m3u8 playlists — see example text and player

    click a file with the extension m3u or m3u8 (for example mixtape.m3u or touhou.m3u8 ) and you get two choices: Play / Edit

    playlists can include songs across folders anywhere on the server, but filekeys/dirkeys are NOT supported, so the listener must have read-access or get-access to the files

    creating a playlist

    with a standalone mediaplayer or copyparty

    you can use foobar2000, deadbeef, just about any standalone player should work — but you might need to edit the filepaths in the playlist so they fit with the server-URLs

    alternatively, you can create the playlist using copyparty itself:

    • open the [🎺] media-player-settings tab and enable the [📻] create-playlist feature — this adds two new buttons in the bottom-right tray, [📻add] and [📻copy] which appear when you listen to music, or when you select a few audiofiles

    • click the 📻add button while a song is playing (or when you’ve selected some songs) and they’ll be added to “the list” (you can’t see it yet)

    • at any time, click 📻copy to send the playlist to your clipboard

      • you can then continue adding more songs if you’d like
      • if you want to wipe the playlist and start from scratch, just refresh the page

    • create a new textfile, name it something.m3u and paste the playlist there

    audio equalizer

    and dynamic range compressor

    can also boost the volume in general, or increase/decrease stereo width (like crossfeed just worse)

    has the convenient side-effect of reducing the pause between songs, so gapless albums play better with the eq enabled (just make it flat)

    not available on iPhones / iPads because AudioContext currently breaks background audio playback on iOS (15.7.8)

    fix unreliable playback on android

    due to phone / app settings, android phones may randomly stop playing music when the power saver kicks in, especially at the end of an album — you can fix it by disabling power saving in the app settings of the browser you use for music streaming (preferably a dedicated one)

    textfile viewer

    with realtime streaming of logfiles and such (demo) , and terminal colors work too

    click -txt- next to a textfile to open the viewer, which has the following toolbar buttons:

    • ✏️ edit opens the textfile editor
    • 📡 follow starts monitoring the file for changes, streaming new lines in realtime
      • similar to tail -f
      • link directly to a file with tailing enabled by adding &tail to the textviewer URL

    markdown viewer

    and there are two editors

    there is a built-in extension for inline clickable thumbnails;

    • enable it by adding somewhere in the doc
    • add thumbnails with !th[l](your.jpg) where l means left-align (r = right-align)
    • a single line with --- clears the float / inlining
    • in the case of README.md being displayed below a file listing, thumbnails will open in the gallery viewer

    other notes,

    • the document preview has a max-width which is the same as an A4 paper when printed

    markdown vars

    dynamic docs with serverside variable expansion to replace stuff like {{self.ip}} with the client’s IP, or {{srv.htime}} with the current time on the server

    see ./srv/expand/ for usage and examples

    other tricks

    • you can link a particular timestamp in an audio file by adding it to the URL, such as &20 / &20s / &1m20 / &t=1:20 after the .../#af-c8960dab

    • enabling the audio equalizer can help make gapless albums fully gapless in some browsers (chrome), so consider leaving it on with all the values at zero

    • get a plaintext file listing by adding ?ls=t to a URL, or a compact colored one with ?ls=v (for unix terminals)

    • if you are using media hotkeys to switch songs and are getting tired of seeing the OSD popup which Windows doesn’t let you disable, consider ./contrib/media-osd-bgone.ps1

    • click the bottom-left π to open a javascript prompt for debugging

    • files named .prologue.html / .epilogue.html will be rendered before/after directory listings unless --no-logues

    • files named descript.ion / DESCRIPT.ION are parsed and displayed in the file listing, or as the epilogue if nonstandard

    • files named README.md / readme.md will be rendered after directory listings unless --no-readme (but .epilogue.html takes precedence)

      • and PREADME.md / preadme.md is shown above directory listings unless --no-readme or .prologue.html

    • README.md and *logue.html can contain placeholder values which are replaced server-side before embedding into directory listings; see --help-exp

    searching

    search by size, date, path/name, mp3-tags, …

    when started with -e2dsa copyparty will scan/index all your files. This avoids duplicates on upload, and also makes the volumes searchable through the web-ui:

    • make search queries by size/date/directory-path/filename, or…
    • drag/drop a local file to see if the same contents exist somewhere on the server, see file-search

    path/name queries are space-separated, AND’ed together, and words are negated with a - prefix, so for example:

    • path: shibayan -bossa finds all files where one of the folders contain shibayan but filters out any results where bossa exists somewhere in the path
    • name: demetori styx gives you good stuff

    the raw field allows for more complex stuff such as ( tags like *nhato* or tags like *taishi* ) and ( not tags like *nhato* or not tags like *taishi* ) which finds all songs by either nhato or taishi, excluding collabs (terrible example, why would you do that)

    for the above example to work, add the commandline argument -e2ts to also scan/index tags from music files, which brings us over to:

    server config

    using arguments or config files, or a mix of both:

    • config files (-c some.conf) can set additional commandline arguments; see ./docs/example.conf and ./docs/example2.conf
    • kill -s USR1 (same as systemctl reload copyparty) to reload accounts and volumes from config files without restarting
      • or click the [reload cfg] button in the control-panel if the user has a/admin in any volume
      • changes to the [global] config section requires a restart to take effect

    NB: as humongous as this readme is, there is also a lot of undocumented features. Run copyparty with --help to see all available global options; all of those can be used in the [global] section of config files, and everything listed in --help-flags can be used in volumes as volflags.

    zeroconf

    announce enabled services on the LAN (pic) — -z enables both mdns and ssdp

    • --z-on / --z-off limits the feature to certain networks

    config file example:

    [global]
  z      # enable all zeroconf features (mdns, ssdp)
  zm     # only enables mdns (does nothing since we already have z)
  z-on: 192.168.0.0/16, 10.1.2.0/24  # restrict to certain subnets

    mdns

    LAN domain-name and feature announcer

    uses multicast dns to give copyparty a domain which any machine on the LAN can use to access it

    all enabled services (webdav, ftp, smb) will appear in mDNS-aware file managers (KDE, gnome, macOS, …)

    the domain will be partybox.local if the machine’s hostname is partybox unless --name specifies something else

    and the web-UI will be available at http://partybox.local:3923/

    ssdp

    windows-explorer announcer

    uses ssdp to make copyparty appear in the windows file explorer on all machines on the LAN

    doubleclicking the icon opens the “connect” page which explains how to mount copyparty as a local filesystem

    if copyparty does not appear in windows explorer, use --zsv to see why:

    • maybe the discovery multicast was sent from an IP which does not intersect with the server subnets

    qr-code

    print a qr-code (screenshot) for quick access, great between phones on android hotspots which keep changing the subnet

    • --qr enables it
    • --qrs does https instead of http
    • --qrl lootbox/?pw=hunter2 appends to the url, linking to the lootbox folder with password hunter2
    • --qrz 1 forces 1x zoom instead of autoscaling to fit the terminal size
      • 1x may render incorrectly on some terminals/fonts, but 2x should always work

    it uses the server hostname if mdns is enabled, otherwise it’ll use your external ip (default route) unless --qri specifies a specific ip-prefix or domain

    ftp server

    an FTP server can be started using --ftp 3921, and/or --ftps for explicit TLS (ftpes)

    • based on pyftpdlib
    • needs a dedicated port (cannot share with the HTTP/HTTPS API)
    • uploads are not resumable — delete and restart if necessary
    • runs in active mode by default, you probably want --ftp-pr 12000-13000
      • if you enable both ftp and ftps, the port-range will be divided in half
      • some older software (filezilla on debian-stable) cannot passive-mode with TLS
    • login with any username + your password, or put your password in the username field

    some recommended FTP / FTPS clients; wark = example password:

    webdav server

    with read-write support, supports winXP and later, macos, nautilus/gvfs … a great way to access copyparty straight from the file explorer in your OS

    click the connect button in the control-panel to see connection instructions for windows, linux, macos

    general usage:

    • login with any username + your password, or put your password in the username field (password field can be empty/whatever)

    on macos, connect from finder:

    in order to grant full write-access to webdav clients, the volflag daw must be set and the account must also have delete-access (otherwise the client won’t be allowed to replace the contents of existing files, which is how webdav works)

    note: if you have enabled IdP authentication then that may cause issues for some/most webdav clients; see the webdav section in the IdP docs

    connecting to webdav from windows

    using the GUI (winXP or later):

    • rightclick [my computer] -> [map network drive] -> Folder: http://192.168.123.1:3923/
      • on winXP only, click the Sign up for online storage hyperlink instead and put the URL there
      • providing your password as the username is recommended; the password field can be anything or empty

    the webdav client that’s built into windows has the following list of bugs; you can avoid all of these by connecting with rclone instead:

    • win7+ doesn’t actually send the password to the server when reauthenticating after a reboot unless you first try to login with an incorrect password and then switch to the correct password
      • or just type your password into the username field instead to get around it entirely
    • connecting to a folder which allows anonymous read will make writing impossible, as windows has decided it doesn’t need to login
      • workaround: connect twice; first to a folder which requires auth, then to the folder you actually want, and leave both of those mounted
      • or set the server-option --dav-auth to force password-auth for all webdav clients
    • win7+ may open a new tcp connection for every file and sometimes forgets to close them, eventually needing a reboot
      • maybe NIC-related (??), happens with win10-ltsc on e1000e but not virtio
    • windows cannot access folders which contain filenames with invalid unicode or forbidden characters (<>:"/|?*), or names ending with .
    • winxp cannot show unicode characters outside of some range
      • latin-1 is fine, hiragana is not (not even as shift-jis on japanese xp)

    tftp server

    a TFTP server (read/write) can be started using --tftp 3969 (you probably want ftp instead unless you are actually communicating with hardware from the 90s (in which case we should definitely hang some time))

    that makes this the first RTX DECT Base that has been updated using copyparty 🎉

    • based on partftpy
    • no accounts; read from world-readable folders, write to world-writable, overwrite in world-deletable
    • needs a dedicated port (cannot share with the HTTP/HTTPS API)
      • run as root (or see below) to use the spec-recommended port 69 (nice)
    • can reply from a predefined portrange (good for firewalls)
    • only supports the binary/octet/image transfer mode (no netascii)
    • RFC 7440 is not supported, so will be extremely slow over WAN
      • assuming default blksize (512), expect 1100 KiB/s over 100BASE-T, 400-500 KiB/s over wifi, 200 on bad wifi

    most clients expect to find TFTP on port 69, but on linux and macos you need to be root to listen on that. Alternatively, listen on 3969 and use NAT on the server to forward 69 to that port;

    • on linux: iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p udp --dport 69 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3969

    some recommended TFTP clients:

    • curl (cross-platform, read/write)
      • get: curl --tftp-blksize 1428 tftp://127.0.0.1:3969/firmware.bin
      • put: curl --tftp-blksize 1428 -T firmware.bin tftp://127.0.0.1:3969/
    • windows: tftp.exe (you probably already have it)
      • tftp -i 127.0.0.1 put firmware.bin
    • linux: tftp-hpa, atftp
      • atftp --option "blksize 1428" 127.0.0.1 3969 -p -l firmware.bin -r firmware.bin
      • tftp -v -m binary 127.0.0.1 3969 -c put firmware.bin

    smb server

    unsafe, slow, not recommended for wan, enable with --smb for read-only or --smbw for read-write

    click the connect button in the control-panel to see connection instructions for windows, linux, macos

    dependencies: python3 -m pip install --user -U impacket==0.11.0

    • newer versions of impacket will hopefully work just fine but there is monkeypatching so maybe not

    some BIG WARNINGS specific to SMB/CIFS, in decreasing importance:

    • not entirely confident that read-only is read-only
    • the smb backend is not fully integrated with vfs, meaning there could be security issues (path traversal). Please use --smb-port (see below) and prisonparty or bubbleparty
      • account passwords work per-volume as expected, and so does account permissions (read/write/move/delete), but --smbw must be given to allow write-access from smb
      • shadowing probably works as expected but no guarantees

    and some minor issues,

    • clients only see the first ~400 files in big folders;
      • this was originally due to impacket#1433 which was fixed in impacket-0.12, so you can disable the workaround with --smb-nwa-1 but then you get unacceptably poor performance instead
    • hot-reload of server config (/?reload=cfg) does not include the [global] section (commandline args)
    • listens on the first IPv4 -i interface only (default = :: = 0.0.0.0 = all)
    • login doesn’t work on winxp, but anonymous access is ok — remove all accounts from copyparty config for that to work
      • win10 onwards does not allow connecting anonymously / without accounts
    • python3 only
    • slow (the builtin webdav support in windows is 5x faster, and rclone-webdav is 30x faster)

    known client bugs:

    • on win7 only, --smb1 is much faster than smb2 (default) because it keeps rescanning folders on smb2
      • however smb1 is buggy and is not enabled by default on win10 onwards
    • windows cannot access folders which contain filenames with invalid unicode or forbidden characters (<>:"/|?*), or names ending with .

    the smb protocol listens on TCP port 445, which is a privileged port on linux and macos, which would require running copyparty as root. However, this can be avoided by listening on another port using --smb-port 3945 and then using NAT on the server to forward the traffic from 445 to there;

    • on linux: iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -i eth0 -p tcp --dport 445 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3945

    authenticate with one of the following:

    • username $username, password $password
    • username $password, password k

    browser ux

    tweaking the ui

    • set default sort order globally with --sort or per-volume with the sort volflag; specify one or more comma-separated columns to sort by, and prefix the column name with - for reverse sort
      • the column names you can use are visible as tooltips when hovering over the column headers in the directory listing, for example href ext sz ts tags/.up_at tags/Circle tags/.tn tags/Artist tags/Title
      • to sort in music order (album, track, artist, title) with filename as fallback, you could --sort tags/Circle,tags/.tn,tags/Artist,tags/Title,href
      • to sort by upload date, first enable showing the upload date in the listing with -e2d -mte +.up_at and then --sort tags/.up_at

    see ./docs/rice for more, including how to add stuff (css//…) to the html tag, or to add your own translation

    opengraph

    discord and social-media embeds

    can be enabled globally with --og or per-volume with volflag og

    note that this disables hotlinking because the opengraph spec demands it; to sneak past this intentional limitation, you can enable opengraph selectively by user-agent, for example --og-ua '(Discord|Twitter|Slack)bot' (or volflag og_ua)

    you can also hotlink files regardless by appending ?raw to the url

    if you want to entirely replace the copyparty response with your own jinja2 template, give the template filepath to --og-tpl or volflag og_tpl (all members of HttpCli are available through the this object)

    file deduplication

    enable symlink-based upload deduplication globally with --dedup or per-volume with volflag dedup

    by default, when someone tries to upload a file that already exists on the server, the upload will be politely declined, and the server will copy the existing file over to where the upload would have gone

    if you enable deduplication with --dedup then it’ll create a symlink instead of a full copy, thus reducing disk space usage

    • on the contrary, if your server is hooked up to s3-glacier or similar storage where reading is expensive, and you cannot use --safe-dedup=1 because you have other software tampering with your files, so you want to entirely disable detection of duplicate data instead, then you can specify --no-clone globally or noclone as a volflag

    warning: when enabling dedup, you should also:

    • enable indexing with -e2dsa or volflag e2dsa (see file indexing section below); strongly recommended
    • …and/or --hardlink-only to use hardlink-based deduplication instead of symlinks; see explanation below

    it will not be safe to rename/delete files if you only enable dedup and none of the above; if you enable indexing then it is not necessary to also do hardlinks (but you may still want to)

    by default, deduplication is done based on symlinks (symbolic links); these are tiny files which are pointers to the nearest full copy of the file

    you can choose to use hardlinks instead of softlinks, globally with --hardlink-only or volflag hardlinkonly;

    advantages of using hardlinks:

    • hardlinks are more compatible with other software; they behave entirely like regular files
    • you can safely move and rename files using other file managers
      • symlinks need to be managed by copyparty to ensure the destinations remain correct

    advantages of using symlinks (default):

    • each symlink can have its own last-modified timestamp, but a single timestamp is shared by all hardlinks
    • symlinks make it more obvious to other software that the file is not a regular file, so this can be less dangerous
      • hardlinks look like regular files, so other software may assume they are safe to edit without affecting the other copies

    warning: if you edit the contents of a deduplicated file, then you will also edit all other copies of that file! This is especially surprising with hardlinks, because they look like regular files, but that same file exists in multiple locations

    global-option --xlink / volflag xlink additionally enables deduplication across volumes, but this is probably buggy and not recommended

    config file example:

    [global]
  e2dsa  # scan and index filesystem on startup
  dedup  # symlink-based deduplication for all volumes

[/media]
  /mnt/nas/media
  flags:
    hardlinkonly  # this vol does hardlinks instead of symlinks

    file indexing

    enable music search, upload-undo, and better dedup

    file indexing relies on two database tables, the up2k filetree (-e2d) and the metadata tags (-e2t), stored in .hist/up2k.db. Configuration can be done through arguments, volflags, or a mix of both.

    through arguments:

    • -e2d enables file indexing on upload
    • -e2ds also scans writable folders for new files on startup
    • -e2dsa also scans all mounted volumes (including readonly ones)
    • -e2t enables metadata indexing on upload
    • -e2ts also scans for tags in all files that don’t have tags yet
    • -e2tsr also deletes all existing tags, doing a full reindex
    • -e2v verifies file integrity at startup, comparing hashes from the db
    • -e2vu patches the database with the new hashes from the filesystem
    • -e2vp panics and kills copyparty instead

    the same arguments can be set as volflags, in addition to d2d, d2ds, d2t, d2ts, d2v for disabling:

    • -v ~/music::r:c,e2ds,e2tsr does a full reindex of everything on startup
    • -v ~/music::r:c,d2d disables all indexing, even if any -e2* are on
    • -v ~/music::r:c,d2t disables all -e2t* (tags), does not affect -e2d*
    • -v ~/music::r:c,d2ds disables on-boot scans; only index new uploads
    • -v ~/music::r:c,d2ts same except only affecting tags

    note:

    • upload-times can be displayed in the file listing by enabling the .up_at metadata key, either globally with -e2d -mte +.up_at or per-volume with volflags e2d,mte=+.up_at (will have a ~17% performance impact on directory listings)
    • e2tsr is probably always overkill, since e2ds/e2dsa would pick up any file modifications and e2ts would then reindex those, unless there is a new copyparty version with new parsers and the release note says otherwise

    config file example (these options are recommended btw):

    [global]
  e2dsa  # scan and index all files in all volumes on startup
  e2ts   # check newly-discovered or uploaded files for media tags

    exclude-patterns

    to save some time, you can provide a regex pattern for filepaths to only index by filename/path/size/last-modified (and not the hash of the file contents) by setting --no-hash '.iso$' or the volflag :c,nohash=.iso$, this has the following consequences:

    • initial indexing is way faster, especially when the volume is on a network disk
    • makes it impossible to file-search
    • if someone uploads the same file contents, the upload will not be detected as a dupe, so it will not get symlinked or rejected

    similarly, you can fully ignore files/folders using --no-idx [...] and :c,noidx=.iso$

    NOTE: no-idx and/or no-hash prevents deduplication of those files

    • when running on macos, all the usual apple metadata files are excluded by default

    if you set --no-hash [...] globally, you can enable hashing for specific volumes using flag :c,nohash=

    to exclude certain filepaths from search-results, use --srch-excl or volflag srch_excl instead of --no-idx, for example --srch-excl 'password|logs/[0-9]'

    config file example:

    [/games]
  /mnt/nas/games
  flags:
    noidx: .iso$  # skip indexing iso-files
    srch_excl: password|logs/[0-9]  # filter search results

    filesystem guards

    avoid traversing into other filesystems using --xdev / volflag :c,xdev, skipping any symlinks or bind-mounts to another HDD for example

    and/or you can --xvol / :c,xvol to ignore all symlinks leaving the volume’s top directory, but still allow bind-mounts pointing elsewhere

    • symlinks are permitted with xvol if they point into another volume where the user has the same level of access

    these options will reduce performance; unlikely worst-case estimates are 14% reduction for directory listings, 35% for download-as-tar

    as of copyparty v1.7.0 these options also prevent file access at runtime — in previous versions it was just hints for the indexer

    periodic rescan

    filesystem monitoring; if copyparty is not the only software doing stuff on your filesystem, you may want to enable periodic rescans to keep the index up to date

    argument --re-maxage 60 will rescan all volumes every 60 sec, same as volflag :c,scan=60 to specify it per-volume

    uploads are disabled while a rescan is happening, so rescans will be delayed by --db-act (default 10 sec) when there is write-activity going on (uploads, renames, …)

    note: folder-thumbnails are selected during filesystem indexing, so periodic rescans can be used to keep them accurate as images are uploaded/deleted (or manually do a rescan with the reload button in the controlpanel)

    config file example:

    [global]
  re-maxage: 3600

[/pics]
  /mnt/nas/pics
  flags:
    scan: 900

    upload rules

    set upload rules using volflags, some examples:

    • :c,sz=1k-3m sets allowed filesize between 1 KiB and 3 MiB inclusive (suffixes: b, k, m, g)
    • :c,df=4g block uploads if there would be less than 4 GiB free disk space afterwards
    • :c,vmaxb=1g block uploads if total volume size would exceed 1 GiB afterwards
    • :c,vmaxn=4k block uploads if volume would contain more than 4096 files afterwards
    • :c,nosub disallow uploading into subdirectories; goes well with rotn and rotf:
    • :c,rotn=1000,2 moves uploads into subfolders, up to 1000 files in each folder before making a new one, two levels deep (must be at least 1)
    • :c,rotf=%Y/%m/%d/%H enforces files to be uploaded into a structure of subfolders according to that date format
      • if someone uploads to /foo/bar the path would be rewritten to /foo/bar/2021/08/06/23 for example
      • but the actual value is not verified, just the structure, so the uploader can choose any values which conform to the format string
        • just to avoid additional complexity in up2k which is enough of a mess already
    • :c,lifetime=300 delete uploaded files when they become 5 minutes old

    you can also set transaction limits which apply per-IP and per-volume, but these assume -j 1 (default) otherwise the limits will be off, for example -j 4 would allow anywhere between 1x and 4x the limits you set depending on which processing node the client gets routed to

    • :c,maxn=250,3600 allows 250 files over 1 hour from each IP (tracked per-volume)
    • :c,maxb=1g,300 allows 1 GiB total over 5 minutes from each IP (tracked per-volume)

    notes:

    • vmaxb and vmaxn requires either the e2ds volflag or -e2dsa global-option

    config file example:

    [/inc]
  /mnt/nas/uploads
  accs:
    w: *    # anyone can upload here
    rw: ed  # only user "ed" can read-write
  flags:
    e2ds       # filesystem indexing is required for many of these:
    sz: 1k-3m  # accept upload only if filesize in this range
    df: 4g     # free disk space cannot go lower than this
    vmaxb: 1g  # volume can never exceed 1 GiB
    vmaxn: 4k  # ...or 4000 files, whichever comes first
    nosub      # must upload to toplevel folder
    lifetime: 300   # uploads are deleted after 5min
    maxn: 250,3600  # each IP can upload 250 files in 1 hour
    maxb: 1g,300    # each IP can upload 1 GiB over 5 minutes

    compress uploads

    files can be autocompressed on upload, either on user-request (if config allows) or forced by server-config

    • volflag gz allows gz compression
    • volflag xz allows lzma compression
    • volflag pk forces compression on all files
    • url parameter pk requests compression with server-default algorithm
    • url parameter gz or xz requests compression with a specific algorithm
    • url parameter xz requests xz compression

    things to note,

    • the gz and xz arguments take a single optional argument, the compression level (range 0 to 9)
    • the pk volflag takes the optional argument ALGORITHM,LEVEL which will then be forced for all uploads, for example gz,9 or xz,0
    • default compression is gzip level 9
    • all upload methods except up2k are supported
    • the files will be indexed after compression, so dupe-detection and file-search will not work as expected

    some examples,

    • -v inc:inc:w:c,pk=xz,0
      folder named inc, shared at inc, write-only for everyone, forces xz compression at level 0
    • -v inc:inc:w:c,pk
      same write-only inc, but forces gz compression (default) instead of xz
    • -v inc:inc:w:c,gz
      allows (but does not force) gz compression if client uploads to /inc?pk or /inc?gz or /inc?gz=4

    other flags

    • :c,magic enables filetype detection for nameless uploads, same as --magic

    database location

    in-volume (.hist/up2k.db, default) or somewhere else

    copyparty creates a subfolder named .hist inside each volume where it stores the database, thumbnails, and some other stuff

    this can instead be kept in a single place using the --hist argument, or the hist= volflag, or a mix of both:

    • --hist ~/.cache/copyparty -v ~/music::r:c,hist=- sets ~/.cache/copyparty as the default place to put volume info, but ~/music gets the regular .hist subfolder (- restores default behavior)

    by default, the per-volume up2k.db sqlite3-database for -e2d and -e2t is stored next to the thumbnails according to the --hist option, but the global-option --dbpath and/or volflag dbpath can be used to put the database somewhere else

    if your storage backend is unreliable (NFS or bad HDDs), you can specify one or more “landmarks” to look for before doing anything database-related. A landmark is a file which is always expected to exist inside the volume. This avoids spurious filesystem rescans in the event of an outage. One line per landmark (see example below)

    note:

    • putting the hist-folders on an SSD is strongly recommended for performance
    • markdown edits are always stored in a local .hist subdirectory
    • on windows the volflag path is cyglike, so /c/temp means C:temp but use regular paths for --hist
      • you can use cygpaths for volumes too, -v C:Users::r and -v /c/users::r both work

    config file example:

    [global]
  hist: ~/.cache/copyparty  # put db/thumbs/etc. here by default

[/pics]
  /mnt/nas/pics
  flags:
    hist: -  # restore the default (/mnt/nas/pics/.hist/)
    hist: /mnt/nas/cache/pics/  # can be absolute path
    landmark: me.jpg  # /mnt/nas/pics/me.jpg must be readable to enable db
    landmark: info/a.txt^=ok  # and this textfile must start with "ok"

    metadata from audio files

    set -e2t to index tags on upload

    -mte decides which tags to index and display in the browser (and also the display order), this can be changed per-volume:

    • -v ~/music::r:c,mte=title,artist indexes and displays title followed by artist

    if you add/remove a tag from mte you will need to run with -e2tsr once to rebuild the database, otherwise only new files will be affected

    but instead of using -mte, -mth is a better way to hide tags in the browser: these tags will not be displayed by default, but they still get indexed and become searchable, and users can choose to unhide them in the [⚙️] config pane

    -mtm can be used to add or redefine a metadata mapping, say you have media files with foo and bar tags and you want them to display as qux in the browser (preferring foo if both are present), then do -mtm qux=foo,bar and now you can -mte artist,title,qux

    tags that start with a . such as .bpm and .dur(ation) indicate numeric value

    see the beautiful mess of a dictionary in mtag.py for the default mappings (should cover mp3,opus,flac,m4a,wav,aif,)

    --no-mutagen disables Mutagen and uses FFprobe instead, which…

    • is about 20x slower than Mutagen
    • catches a few tags that Mutagen doesn’t
      • melodic key, video resolution, framerate, pixfmt
    • avoids pulling any GPL code into copyparty
    • more importantly runs FFprobe on incoming files which is bad if your FFmpeg has a cve

    --mtag-to sets the tag-scan timeout; very high default (60 sec) to cater for zfs and other randomly-freezing filesystems. Lower values like 10 are usually safe, allowing for faster processing of tricky files

    file parser plugins

    provide custom parsers to index additional tags, also see ./bin/mtag/README.md

    copyparty can invoke external programs to collect additional metadata for files using mtp (either as argument or volflag), there is a default timeout of 60sec, and only files which contain audio get analyzed by default (see ay/an/ad below)

    • -mtp .bpm=~/bin/audio-bpm.py will execute ~/bin/audio-bpm.py with the audio file as argument 1 to provide the .bpm tag, if that does not exist in the audio metadata
    • -mtp key=f,t5,~/bin/audio-key.py uses ~/bin/audio-key.py to get the key tag, replacing any existing metadata tag (f,), aborting if it takes longer than 5sec (t5,)
    • -v ~/music::r:c,mtp=.bpm=~/bin/audio-bpm.py:c,mtp=key=f,t5,~/bin/audio-key.py both as a per-volume config wow this is getting ugly

    but wait, there’s more! -mtp can be used for non-audio files as well using the a flag: ay only do audio files (default), an only do non-audio files, or ad do all files (d as in dontcare)

    • “audio file” also means videos btw, as long as there is an audio stream
    • -mtp ext=an,~/bin/file-ext.py runs ~/bin/file-ext.py to get the ext tag only if file is not audio (an)
    • -mtp arch,built,ver,orig=an,eexe,edll,~/bin/exe.py runs ~/bin/exe.py to get properties about windows-binaries only if file is not audio (an) and file extension is exe or dll
    • if you want to daisychain parsers, use the p flag to set processing order
      • -mtp foo=p1,~/a.py runs before -mtp foo=p2,~/b.py and will forward all the tags detected so far as json to the stdin of b.py
    • option c0 disables capturing of stdout/stderr, so copyparty will not receive any tags from the process at all — instead the invoked program is free to print whatever to the console, just using copyparty as a launcher
      • c1 captures stdout only, c2 only stderr, and c3 (default) captures both
    • you can control how the parser is killed if it times out with option kt killing the entire process tree (default), km just the main process, or kn let it continue running until copyparty is terminated

    if something doesn’t work, try --mtag-v for verbose error messages

    config file example; note that mtp is an additive option so all of the mtp options will take effect:

    [/music]
  /mnt/nas/music
  flags:
    mtp: .bpm=~/bin/audio-bpm.py  # assign ".bpm" (numeric) with script
    mtp: key=f,t5,~/bin/audio-key.py  # force/overwrite, 5sec timeout
    mtp: ext=an,~/bin/file-ext.py  # will only run on non-audio files
    mtp: arch,built,ver,orig=an,eexe,edll,~/bin/exe.py  # only exe/dll

    event hooks

    trigger a program on uploads, renames etc (examples)

    you can set hooks before and/or after an event happens, and currently you can hook uploads, moves/renames, and deletes

    there’s a bunch of flags and stuff, see --help-hooks

    if you want to write your own hooks, see devnotes

    zeromq

    event-hooks can send zeromq messages instead of running programs

    to send a 0mq message every time a file is uploaded,

    • --xau zmq:pub:tcp://*:5556 sends a PUB to any/all connected SUB clients
    • --xau t3,zmq:push:tcp://*:5557 sends a PUSH to exactly one connected PULL client
    • --xau t3,j,zmq:req:tcp://localhost:5555 sends a REQ to the connected REP client

    the PUSH and REQ examples have t3 (timeout after 3 seconds) because they block if there’s no clients to talk to

    • the REQ example does t3,j to send extended upload-info as json instead of just the filesystem-path

    see zmq-recv.py if you need something to receive the messages with

    config file example; note that the hooks are additive options, so all of the xau options will take effect:

    [global]
  xau: zmq:pub:tcp://*:5556`  # send a PUB to any/all connected SUB clients
  xau: t3,zmq:push:tcp://*:5557`  # send PUSH to exactly one connected PULL cli
  xau: t3,j,zmq:req:tcp://localhost:5555`  # send REQ to the connected REP cli

    upload events

    the older, more powerful approach (examples):

    -v /mnt/inc:inc:w:c,e2d,e2t,mte=+x1:c,mtp=x1=ad,kn,/usr/bin/notify-send

    that was the commandline example; here’s the config file example:

    [/inc]
  /mnt/inc
  accs:
    w: *
  flags:
    e2d, e2t  # enable indexing of uploaded files and their tags
    mte: +x1
    mtp: x1=ad,kn,/usr/bin/notify-send

    so filesystem location /mnt/inc shared at /inc, write-only for everyone, appending x1 to the list of tags to index (mte), and using /usr/bin/notify-send to “provide” tag x1 for any filetype (ad) with kill-on-timeout disabled (kn)

    that’ll run the command notify-send with the path to the uploaded file as the first and only argument (so on linux it’ll show a notification on-screen)

    note that this is way more complicated than the new event hooks but this approach has the following advantages:

    • non-blocking and multithreaded; doesn’t hold other uploads back
    • you get access to tags from FFmpeg and other mtp parsers
    • only trigger on new unique files, not dupes

    note that it will occupy the parsing threads, so fork anything expensive (or set kn to have copyparty fork it for you) — otoh if you want to intentionally queue/singlethread you can combine it with --mtag-mt 1

    for reference, if you were to do this using event hooks instead, it would be like this: -e2d --xau notify-send,hello,--

    handlers

    redefine behavior with plugins (examples)

    replace 404 and 403 errors with something completely different (that’s it for now)

    as for client-side stuff, there is plugins for modifying UI/UX

    ip auth

    autologin based on IP range (CIDR) , using the global-option --ipu

    for example, if everyone with an IP that starts with 192.168.123 should automatically log in as the user spartacus, then you can either specify --ipu=192.168.123.0/24=spartacus as a commandline option, or put this in a config file:

    [global]
  ipu: 192.168.123.0/24=spartacus

    repeat the option to map additional subnets

    be careful with this one! if you have a reverseproxy, then you definitely want to make sure you have real-ip configured correctly, and it’s probably a good idea to nullmap the reverseproxy’s IP just in case; so if your reverseproxy is sending requests from 172.24.27.9 then that would be --ipu=172.24.27.9/32=

    identity providers

    replace copyparty passwords with oauth and such

    you can disable the built-in password-based login system, and instead replace it with a separate piece of software (an identity provider) which will then handle authenticating / authorizing of users; this makes it possible to login with passkeys / fido2 / webauthn / yubikey / ldap / active directory / oauth / many other single-sign-on contraptions

    • the regular config-defined users will be used as a fallback for requests which don’t include a valid (trusted) IdP username header

    some popular identity providers are Authelia (config-file based) and authentik (GUI-based, more complex)

    there is a docker-compose example which is hopefully a good starting point (alternatively see ./docs/idp.md if you’re the DIY type)

    a more complete example of the copyparty configuration options look like this

    but if you just want to let users change their own passwords, then you probably want user-changeable passwords instead

    user-changeable passwords

    if permitted, users can change their own passwords in the control-panel

    • not compatible with identity providers

    • must be enabled with --chpw because account-sharing is a popular usecase

      • if you want to enable the feature but deny password-changing for a specific list of accounts, you can do that with --chpw-no name1,name2,name3,...

    • to perform a password reset, edit the server config and give the user another password there, then do a config reload or server restart

    • the custom passwords are kept in a textfile at filesystem-path --chpw-db, by default chpw.json in the copyparty config folder

      • if you run multiple copyparty instances with different users you almost definitely want to specify separate DBs for each instance

      • if password hashing is enabled, the passwords in the db are also hashed

        • …which means that all user-defined passwords will be forgotten if you change password-hashing settings

    using the cloud as storage

    connecting to an aws s3 bucket and similar

    there is no built-in support for this, but you can use FUSE-software such as rclone / geesefs / JuiceFS to first mount your cloud storage as a local disk, and then let copyparty use (a folder in) that disk as a volume

    if copyparty is unable to access the local folder that rclone/geesefs/JuiceFS provides (for example if it looks invisible) then you may need to run rclone with --allow-other and/or enable user_allow_other in /etc/fuse.conf

    you will probably get decent speeds with the default config, however most likely restricted to using one TCP connection per file, so the upload-client won’t be able to send multiple chunks in parallel

    before v1.13.5 it was recommended to use the volflag sparse to force-allow multiple chunks in parallel; this would improve the upload-speed from 1.5 MiB/s to over 80 MiB/s at the risk of provoking latent bugs in S3 or JuiceFS. But v1.13.5 added chunk-stitching, so this is now probably much less important. On the contrary, nosparse may now increase performance in some cases. Please try all three options (default, sparse, nosparse) as the optimal choice depends on your network conditions and software stack (both the FUSE-driver and cloud-server)

    someone has also tested geesefs in combination with gocryptfs with surprisingly good results, getting 60 MiB/s upload speeds on a gbit line, but JuiceFS won with 80 MiB/s using its built-in encryption

    you may improve performance by specifying larger values for --iobuf / --s-rd-sz / --s-wr-sz

    if you’ve experimented with this and made interesting observations, please share your findings so we can add a section with specific recommendations 🙂

    hiding from google

    tell search engines you don’t wanna be indexed, either using the good old robots.txt or through copyparty settings:

    • --no-robots adds HTTP (X-Robots-Tag) and HTML () headers with noindex, nofollow globally
    • volflag [...]:c,norobots does the same thing for that single volume
    • volflag [...]:c,robots ALLOWS search-engine crawling for that volume, even if --no-robots is set globally

    also, --force-js disables the plain HTML folder listing, making things harder to parse for some search engines — note that crawlers which understand javascript (such as google) will not be affected

    themes

    you can change the default theme with --theme 2, and add your own themes by modifying browser.css or providing your own css to --css-browser, then telling copyparty they exist by increasing --themes

    the classname of the HTML tag is set according to the selected theme, which is used to set colors as css variables ++

    • each theme generally has a dark theme (even numbers) and a light theme (odd numbers), showing in pairs
    • the first theme (theme 0 and 1) is html.a, second theme (2 and 3) is html.b
    • if a light theme is selected, html.y is set, otherwise html.z is
    • so if the dark edition of the 2nd theme is selected, you use any of html.b, html.z, html.bz to specify rules

    see the top of ./copyparty/web/browser.css where the color variables are set, and there’s layout-specific stuff near the bottom

    if you want to change the fonts, see ./docs/rice/

    complete examples

    • see running on windows for a fancy windows setup

      • or use any of the examples below, just replace python copyparty-sfx.py with copyparty.exe if you’re using the exe edition

    • allow anyone to download or upload files into the current folder:
      python copyparty-sfx.py

      • enable searching and music indexing with -e2dsa -e2ts

      • start an FTP server on port 3921 with --ftp 3921

      • announce it on your LAN with -z so it appears in windows/Linux file managers

    • anyone can upload, but nobody can see any files (even the uploader):
      python copyparty-sfx.py -e2dsa -v .::w

      • block uploads if there’s less than 4 GiB free disk space with --df 4

      • show a popup on new uploads with --xau bin/hooks/notify.py

    • anyone can upload, and receive “secret” links for each upload they do:
      python copyparty-sfx.py -e2dsa -v .::wG:c,fk=8

    • anyone can browse (r), only kevin (password okgo) can upload/move/delete (A) files:
      python copyparty-sfx.py -e2dsa -a kevin:okgo -v .::r:A,kevin

    • read-only music server:
      python copyparty-sfx.py -v /mnt/nas/music:/music:r -e2dsa -e2ts --no-robots --force-js --theme 2

      • …with bpm and key scanning
        -mtp .bpm=f,audio-bpm.py -mtp key=f,audio-key.py

      • …with a read-write folder for kevin whose password is okgo
        -a kevin:okgo -v /mnt/nas/inc:/inc:rw,kevin

      • …with logging to disk
        -lo log/cpp-%Y-%m%d-%H%M%S.txt.xz

    listen on port 80 and 443

    become a real webserver which people can access by just going to your IP or domain without specifying a port

    if you’re on windows, then you just need to add the commandline argument -p 80,443 and you’re done! nice

    if you’re on macos, sorry, I don’t know

    if you’re on Linux, you have the following 4 options:

    • option 1: set up a reverse-proxy — this one makes a lot of sense if you’re running on a proper headless server, because that way you get real HTTPS too

    • option 2: NAT to port 3923 — this is cumbersome since you’ll need to do it every time you reboot, and the exact command may depend on your linux distribution:

      iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 80 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3923
iptables -t nat -A PREROUTING -p tcp --dport 443 -j REDIRECT --to-port 3923

    • option 3: disable the security policy which prevents the use of 80 and 443; this is probably fine:

      setcap CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE=+eip $(realpath $(which python))
python copyparty-sfx.py -p 80,443

    • option 4: run copyparty as root (please don’t)

    reverse-proxy

    running copyparty next to other websites hosted on an existing webserver such as nginx, caddy, or apache

    you can either:

    • give copyparty its own domain or subdomain (recommended)
    • or do location-based proxying, using --rp-loc=/stuff to tell copyparty where it is mounted — has a slight performance cost and higher chance of bugs
      • if copyparty says incorrect --rp-loc or webserver config; expected vpath starting with [...] it’s likely because the webserver is stripping away the proxy location from the request URLs — see the ProxyPass in the apache example below

    when running behind a reverse-proxy (this includes services like cloudflare), it is important to configure real-ip correctly, as many features rely on knowing the client’s IP. Look out for red and yellow log messages which explain how to do this. But basically, set --xff-hdr to the name of the http header to read the IP from (usually x-forwarded-for, but cloudflare uses cf-connecting-ip), and then --xff-src to the IP of the reverse-proxy so copyparty will trust the xff-hdr. Note that --rp-loc in particular will not work at all unless you do this

    some reverse proxies (such as Caddy) can automatically obtain a valid https/tls certificate for you, and some support HTTP/2 and QUIC which could be a nice speed boost, depending on a lot of factors

    • warning: nginx-QUIC (HTTP/3) is still experimental and can make uploads much slower, so HTTP/1.1 is recommended for now
    • depending on server/client, HTTP/1.1 can also be 5x faster than HTTP/2

    for improved security (and a 10% performance boost) consider listening on a unix-socket with -i unix:770:www:/tmp/party.sock (permission 770 means only members of group www can access it)

    example webserver / reverse-proxy configs:

    real-ip

    teaching copyparty how to see client IPs when running behind a reverse-proxy, or a WAF, or another protection service such as cloudflare

    if you (and maybe everybody else) keep getting a message that says thank you for playing, then you’ve gotten banned for malicious traffic. This ban applies to the IP address that copyparty thinks identifies the shady client — so, depending on your setup, you might have to tell copyparty where to find the correct IP

    for most common setups, there should be a helpful message in the server-log explaining what to do, but see docs/xff.md if you want to learn more, including a quick hack to just make it work (which is not recommended, but hey…)

    reverse-proxy performance

    most reverse-proxies support connecting to copyparty either using uds/unix-sockets (/dev/shm/party.sock, faster/recommended) or using tcp (127.0.0.1)

    with copyparty listening on a uds / unix-socket / unix-domain-socket and the reverse-proxy connecting to that:

    index.html upload download software
    28’900 req/s 6’900 MiB/s 7’400 MiB/s no-proxy
    18’750 req/s 3’500 MiB/s 2’370 MiB/s haproxy
    9’900 req/s 3’750 MiB/s 2’200 MiB/s caddy
    18’700 req/s 2’200 MiB/s 1’570 MiB/s nginx
    9’700 req/s 1’750 MiB/s 1’830 MiB/s apache
    9’900 req/s 1’300 MiB/s 1’470 MiB/s lighttpd

    when connecting the reverse-proxy to 127.0.0.1 instead (the basic and/or old-fasioned way), speeds are a bit worse:

    index.html upload download software
    21’200 req/s 5’700 MiB/s 6’700 MiB/s no-proxy
    14’500 req/s 1’700 MiB/s 2’170 MiB/s haproxy
    11’100 req/s 2’750 MiB/s 2’000 MiB/s traefik
    8’400 req/s 2’300 MiB/s 1’950 MiB/s caddy
    13’400 req/s 1’100 MiB/s 1’480 MiB/s nginx
    8’400 req/s 1’000 MiB/s 1’000 MiB/s apache
    6’500 req/s 1’270 MiB/s 1’500 MiB/s lighttpd

    in summary, haproxy > caddy > traefik > nginx > apache > lighttpd, and use uds when possible (traefik does not support it yet)

    • if these results are bullshit because my config exampels are bad, please submit corrections!

    permanent cloudflare tunnel

    if you have a domain and want to get your copyparty online real quick, either from your home-PC behind a CGNAT or from a server without an existing reverse-proxy setup, one approach is to create a Cloudflare Tunnel (formerly “Argo Tunnel”)

    I’d recommend making a Locally-managed tunnel for more control, but if you prefer to make a Remotely-managed tunnel then this is currently how:

    • cloudflare dashboard » zero trust » networks » tunnels » create a tunnel » cloudflared » choose a cool subdomain and leave the path blank, and use service type = http and URL = 127.0.0.1:3923

    • and if you want to just run the tunnel without installing it, skip the cloudflared service install BASE64 step and instead do cloudflared --no-autoupdate tunnel run --token BASE64

    NOTE: since people will be connecting through cloudflare, as mentioned in real-ip you should run copyparty with --xff-hdr cf-connecting-ip to detect client IPs correctly

    config file example:

    [global]
  xff-hdr: cf-connecting-ip

    prometheus

    metrics/stats can be enabled at URL /.cpr/metrics for grafana / prometheus / etc (openmetrics 1.0.0)

    must be enabled with --stats since it reduces startup time a tiny bit, and you probably want -e2dsa too

    the endpoint is only accessible by admin accounts, meaning the a in rwmda in the following example commandline: python3 -m copyparty -a ed:wark -v /mnt/nas::rwmda,ed --stats -e2dsa

    follow a guide for setting up node_exporter except have it read from copyparty instead; example /etc/prometheus/prometheus.yml below

    scrape_configs:
  - job_name: copyparty
    metrics_path: /.cpr/metrics
    basic_auth:
      password: wark
    static_configs:
      - targets: ['192.168.123.1:3923']

    currently the following metrics are available,

    • cpp_uptime_seconds time since last copyparty restart
    • cpp_boot_unixtime_seconds same but as an absolute timestamp
    • cpp_active_dl number of active downloads
    • cpp_http_conns number of open http(s) connections
    • cpp_http_reqs number of http(s) requests handled
    • cpp_sus_reqs number of 403/422/malicious requests
    • cpp_active_bans number of currently banned IPs
    • cpp_total_bans number of IPs banned since last restart

    these are available unless --nos-vst is specified:

    • cpp_db_idle_seconds time since last database activity (upload/rename/delete)
    • cpp_db_act_seconds same but as an absolute timestamp
    • cpp_idle_vols number of volumes which are idle / ready
    • cpp_busy_vols number of volumes which are busy / indexing
    • cpp_offline_vols number of volumes which are offline / unavailable
    • cpp_hashing_files number of files queued for hashing / indexing
    • cpp_tagq_files number of files queued for metadata scanning
    • cpp_mtpq_files number of files queued for plugin-based analysis

    and these are available per-volume only:

    • cpp_disk_size_bytes total HDD size
    • cpp_disk_free_bytes free HDD space

    and these are per-volume and total:

    • cpp_vol_bytes size of all files in volume
    • cpp_vol_files number of files
    • cpp_dupe_bytes disk space presumably saved by deduplication
    • cpp_dupe_files number of dupe files
    • cpp_unf_bytes currently unfinished / incoming uploads

    some of the metrics have additional requirements to function correctly,

    • cpp_vol_* requires either the e2ds volflag or -e2dsa global-option

    the following options are available to disable some of the metrics:

    • --nos-hdd disables cpp_disk_* which can prevent spinning up HDDs
    • --nos-vol disables cpp_vol_* which reduces server startup time
    • --nos-vst disables volume state, reducing the worst-case prometheus query time by 0.5 sec
    • --nos-dup disables cpp_dupe_* which reduces the server load caused by prometheus queries
    • --nos-unf disables cpp_unf_* for no particular purpose

    note: the following metrics are counted incorrectly if multiprocessing is enabled with -j: cpp_http_conns, cpp_http_reqs, cpp_sus_reqs, cpp_active_bans, cpp_total_bans

    other extremely specific features

    you’ll never find a use for these:

    custom mimetypes

    change the association of a file extension

    using commandline args, you can do something like --mime gif=image/jif and --mime ts=text/x.typescript (can be specified multiple times)

    in a config file, this is the same as:

    [global]
  mime: gif=image/jif
  mime: ts=text/x.typescript

    run copyparty with --mimes to list all the default mappings

    GDPR compliance

    imagine using copyparty professionally… TINLA/IANAL; EU laws are hella confusing

    • remember to disable logging, or configure logrotation to an acceptable timeframe with -lo cpp-%Y-%m%d.txt.xz or similar

    • if running with the database enabled (recommended), then have it forget uploader-IPs after some time using --forget-ip 43200

      • don’t set it too low; unposting a file is no longer possible after this takes effect

    • if you actually are a lawyer then I’m open for feedback, would be fun

    feature chickenbits

    buggy feature? rip it out by setting any of the following environment variables to disable its associated bell or whistle,

    env-var what it does
    PRTY_NO_DB_LOCK do not lock session/shares-databases for exclusive access
    PRTY_NO_IFADDR disable ip/nic discovery by poking into your OS with ctypes
    PRTY_NO_IMPRESO do not try to load js/css files using importlib.resources
    PRTY_NO_IPV6 disable some ipv6 support (should not be necessary since windows 2000)
    PRTY_NO_LZMA disable streaming xz compression of incoming uploads
    PRTY_NO_MP disable all use of the python multiprocessing module (actual multithreading, cpu-count for parsers/thumbnailers)
    PRTY_NO_SQLITE disable all database-related functionality (file indexing, metadata indexing, most file deduplication logic)
    PRTY_NO_TLS disable native HTTPS support; if you still want to accept HTTPS connections then TLS must now be terminated by a reverse-proxy
    PRTY_NO_TPOKE disable systemd-tmpfilesd avoider

    example: PRTY_NO_IFADDR=1 python3 copyparty-sfx.py

    feature beefybits

    force-enable features with known issues on your OS/env by setting any of the following environment variables, also affectionately known as fuckitbits or hail-mary-bits

    env-var what it does
    PRTY_FORCE_MP force-enable multiprocessing (real multithreading) on MacOS and other broken platforms

    packages

    the party might be closer than you think

    if your distro/OS is not mentioned below, there might be some hints in the «on servers» section

    arch package

    pacman -S copyparty (in arch linux extra)

    it comes with a systemd service and expects to find one or more config files in /etc/copyparty.d/

    after installing it, you may want to cp /usr/lib/systemd/system/copyparty.service /etc/systemd/system/ and then vim /etc/systemd/system/copyparty.service to change what user/group it is running as (you only need to do this once)

    NOTE: there used to be an aur package; this evaporated when copyparty was adopted by the official archlinux repos. If you’re still using the aur package, please move

    fedora package

    does not exist yet; using the copr-pypi builds is NOT recommended because updates can be delayed by several months

    nix package

    nix profile install github:9001/copyparty

    requires a flake-enabled installation of nix

    some recommended dependencies are enabled by default; override the package if you want to add/remove some features/deps

    ffmpeg-full was chosen over ffmpeg-headless mainly because we need withWebp (and withOpenmpt is also nice) and being able to use a cached build felt more important than optimizing for size at the time — PRs welcome if you disagree 👍

    nixos module

    for this setup, you will need a flake-enabled installation of NixOS.

    {
  # add copyparty flake to your inputs
  inputs.copyparty.url = "github:9001/copyparty";

  # ensure that copyparty is an allowed argument to the outputs function
  outputs = { self, nixpkgs, copyparty }: {
    nixosConfigurations.yourHostName = nixpkgs.lib.nixosSystem {
      modules = [
        # load the copyparty NixOS module
        copyparty.nixosModules.default
        ({ pkgs, ... }: {
          # add the copyparty overlay to expose the package to the module
          nixpkgs.overlays = [ copyparty.overlays.default ];
          # (optional) install the package globally
          environment.systemPackages = [ pkgs.copyparty ];
          # configure the copyparty module
          services.copyparty.enable = true;
        })
      ];
    };
  };
}

    copyparty on NixOS is configured via services.copyparty options, for example:

    services.copyparty = {
  enable = true;
  # directly maps to values in the [global] section of the copyparty config.
  # see `copyparty --help` for available options
  settings = {
    i = "0.0.0.0";
    # use lists to set multiple values
    p = [ 3210 3211 ];
    # use booleans to set binary flags
    no-reload = true;
    # using 'false' will do nothing and omit the value when generating a config
    ignored-flag = false;
  };

  # create users
  accounts = {
    # specify the account name as the key
    ed = {
      # provide the path to a file containing the password, keeping it out of /nix/store
      # must be readable by the copyparty service user
      passwordFile = "/run/keys/copyparty/ed_password";
    };
    # or do both in one go
    k.passwordFile = "/run/keys/copyparty/k_password";
  };

  # create a volume
  volumes = {
    # create a volume at "/" (the webroot), which will
    "/" = {
      # share the contents of "/srv/copyparty"
      path = "/srv/copyparty";
      # see `copyparty --help-accounts` for available options
      access = {
        # everyone gets read-access, but
        r = "*";
        # users "ed" and "k" get read-write
        rw = [ "ed" "k" ];
      };
      # see `copyparty --help-flags` for available options
      flags = {
        # "fk" enables filekeys (necessary for upget permission) (4 chars long)
        fk = 4;
        # scan for new files every 60sec
        scan = 60;
        # volflag "e2d" enables the uploads database
        e2d = true;
        # "d2t" disables multimedia parsers (in case the uploads are malicious)
        d2t = true;
        # skips hashing file contents if path matches *.iso
        nohash = ".iso$";
      };
    };
  };
  # you may increase the open file limit for the process
  openFilesLimit = 8192;
};

    the passwordFile at /run/keys/copyparty/ could for example be generated by agenix, or you could just dump it in the nix store instead if that’s acceptable

    browser support

    TLDR: yes

    ie = internet-explorer, ff = firefox, c = chrome, iOS = iPhone/iPad, Andr = Android

    feature ie6 ie9 ie10 ie11 ff 52 c 49 iOS Andr
    browse files yep yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    thumbnail view – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    basic uploader yep yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    up2k – – *1 *1 yep yep yep yep
    make directory yep yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    send message yep yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    set sort order – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    zip selection – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    file search – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    file rename – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    file cut/paste – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    unpost uploads – – yep yep yep yep yep yep
    navpane – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    image viewer – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    video player – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    markdown editor – – *2 *2 yep yep yep yep
    markdown viewer – *2 *2 *2 yep yep yep yep
    play mp3/m4a – yep yep yep yep yep yep yep
    play ogg/opus – – – – yep yep *3 yep
    = feature = ie6 ie9 ie10 ie11 ff 52 c 49 iOS Andr

    • internet explorer 6 through 8 behave the same
    • firefox 52 and chrome 49 are the final winxp versions
    • *1 yes, but extremely slow (ie10: 1 MiB/s, ie11: 270 KiB/s)
    • *2 only able to do plaintext documents (no markdown rendering)
    • *3 iOS 11 and newer, opus only, and requires FFmpeg on the server

    quick summary of more eccentric web-browsers trying to view a directory index:

    browser will it blend
    links (2.21/macports) can browse, login, upload/mkdir/msg
    lynx (2.8.9/macports) can browse, login, upload/mkdir/msg
    w3m (0.5.3/macports) can browse, login, upload at 100kB/s, mkdir/msg
    netsurf (3.10/arch) is basically ie6 with much better css (javascript has almost no effect)
    opera (11.60/winxp) OK: thumbnails, image-viewer, zip-selection, rename/cut/paste. NG: up2k, navpane, markdown, audio
    ie4 and netscape 4.0 can browse, upload with ?b=u, auth with &pw=wark
    ncsa mosaic 2.7 does not get a pass, pic1 – pic2
    SerenityOS (7e98457) hits a page fault, works with ?b=u, file upload not-impl
    sony psp 5.50 can browse, upload/mkdir/msg (thx dwarf) screenshot
    nintendo 3ds can browse, upload, view thumbnails (thx bnjmn)

    client examples

    interact with copyparty using non-browser clients

    • javascript: dump some state into a file (two separate examples)

      • await fetch('//127.0.0.1:3923/', {method:"PUT", body: JSON.stringify(foo)});
      • var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest(); xhr.open('POST', '//127.0.0.1:3923/msgs?raw'); xhr.send('foo');

    • curl/wget: upload some files (post=file, chunk=stdin)

      • post(){ curl -F f=@"$1" http://127.0.0.1:3923/?pw=wark;}
        post movie.mkv (gives HTML in return)
      • post(){ curl -F f=@"$1" 'http://127.0.0.1:3923/?want=url&pw=wark';}
        post movie.mkv (gives hotlink in return)
      • post(){ curl -H pw:wark -H rand:8 -T "$1" http://127.0.0.1:3923/;}
        post movie.mkv (randomized filename)
      • post(){ wget --header='pw: wark' --post-file="$1" -O- http://127.0.0.1:3923/?raw;}
        post movie.mkv
      • chunk(){ curl -H pw:wark -T- http://127.0.0.1:3923/;}
        chunk

    • bash: when curl and wget is not available or too boring

      • (printf 'PUT /junk?pw=wark HTTP/1.1rnrn'; cat movie.mkv) | nc 127.0.0.1 3923
      • (printf 'PUT / HTTP/1.1rnrn'; cat movie.mkv) >/dev/tcp/127.0.0.1/3923

    • python: u2c.py is a command-line up2k client (webm)

    • FUSE: mount a copyparty server as a local filesystem

      • cross-platform python client available in ./bin/
      • able to mount nginx and iis directory listings too, not just copyparty
      • can be downloaded from copyparty: controlpanel -> connect -> partyfuse.py
      • rclone as client can give ~5x performance, see ./docs/rclone.md

    • sharex (screenshot utility): see ./contrib/sharex.sxcu

    • Custom Uploader (an Android app) as an alternative to copyparty's own PartyUP!

      • works if you set UploadURL to https://your.com/foo/?want=url&pw=hunter2 and FormDataName f

    • contextlet (web browser integration); see contrib contextlet

    • igloo irc: Method: post Host: https://you.com/up/?want=url&pw=hunter2 Multipart: yes File parameter: f

    copyparty returns a truncated sha512sum of your PUT/POST as base64; you can generate the same checksum locally to verify uploads:

    b512(){ printf "$((sha512sum||shasum -a512)|sed -E 's/ .*//;s/(..)/\x1/g')"|base64|tr '+/' '-_'|head -c44;}
b512

    you can provide passwords using header PW: hunter2, cookie cppwd=hunter2, url-param ?pw=hunter2, or with basic-authentication (either as the username or password)

    for basic-authentication, all of the following are accepted: password / whatever:password / password:whatever (the username is ignored)

    NOTE: curl will not send the original filename if you use -T combined with url-params! Also, make sure to always leave a trailing slash in URLs unless you want to override the filename

    folder sync

    sync folders to/from copyparty

    NOTE: full bidirectional sync, like what nextcloud and syncthing does, will never be supported! Only single-direction sync (server-to-client, or client-to-server) is possible with copyparty

    the commandline uploader u2c.py with --dr is the best way to sync a folder to copyparty; verifies checksums and does files in parallel, and deletes unexpected files on the server after upload has finished which makes file-renames really cheap (it'll rename serverside and skip uploading)

    alternatively there is rclone which allows for bidirectional sync and is way more flexible (stream files straight from sftp/s3/gcs to copyparty, ...), although there is no integrity check and it won't work with files over 100 MiB if copyparty is behind cloudflare

    • starting from rclone v1.63, rclone is faster than u2c.py on low-latency connections

    mount as drive

    a remote copyparty server as a local filesystem; go to the control-panel and click connect to see a list of commands to do that

    alternatively, some alternatives roughly sorted by speed (unreproducible benchmark), best first:

    most clients will fail to mount the root of a copyparty server unless there is a root volume (so you get the admin-panel instead of a browser when accessing it) -- in that case, mount a specific volume instead

    if you have volumes that are accessible without a password, then some webdav clients (such as davfs2) require the global-option --dav-auth to access any password-protected areas

    android app

    upload to copyparty with one tap

    '' ''

    the app is NOT the full copyparty server! just a basic upload client, nothing fancy yet

    if you want to run the copyparty server on your android device, see install on android

    iOS shortcuts

    there is no iPhone app, but the following shortcuts are almost as good:

    • upload to copyparty (offline) (png) based on the original by Daedren (thx!)
      • can strip exif, upload files, pics, vids, links, clipboard
      • can download links and rehost the target file on copyparty (see first comment inside the shortcut)
      • pics become lowres if you share from gallery to shortcut, so better to launch the shortcut and pick stuff from there

    performance

    defaults are usually fine - expect 8 GiB/s download, 1 GiB/s upload

    below are some tweaks roughly ordered by usefulness:

    • disabling HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 can make uploads 5x faster, depending on server/client software

    • -q disables logging and can help a bunch, even when combined with -lo to redirect logs to file

    • --hist pointing to a fast location (ssd) will make directory listings and searches faster when -e2d or -e2t is set

      • and also makes thumbnails load faster, regardless of e2d/e2t

    • --dedup enables deduplication and thus avoids writing to the HDD if someone uploads a dupe

    • --safe-dedup 1 makes deduplication much faster during upload by skipping verification of file contents; safe if there is no other software editing/moving the files in the volumes

    • --no-dirsz shows the size of folder inodes instead of the total size of the contents, giving about 30% faster folder listings

    • --no-hash . when indexing a network-disk if you don't care about the actual filehashes and only want the names/tags searchable

    • if your volumes are on a network-disk such as NFS / SMB / s3, specifying larger values for --iobuf and/or --s-rd-sz and/or --s-wr-sz may help; try setting all of them to 524288 or 1048576 or 4194304

    • --no-htp --hash-mt=0 --mtag-mt=1 --th-mt=1 minimizes the number of threads; can help in some eccentric environments (like the vscode debugger)

    • when running on AlpineLinux or other musl-based distro, try mimalloc for higher performance (and twice as much RAM usage); apk add mimalloc2 and run copyparty with env-var LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libmimalloc-secure.so.2

      • note that mimalloc requires special care when combined with prisonparty and/or bubbleparty/bubblewrap; you must give it access to /proc and /sys otherwise you'll encounter issues with FFmpeg (audio transcoding, thumbnails)

    • -j0 enables multiprocessing (actual multithreading), can reduce latency to 20+80/numCores percent and generally improve performance in cpu-intensive workloads, for example:

      • lots of connections (many users or heavy clients)
      • simultaneous downloads and uploads saturating a 20gbps connection
      • if -e2d is enabled, -j2 gives 4x performance for directory listings; -j4 gives 16x

      ...however it also increases the server/filesystem/HDD load during uploads, and adds an overhead to internal communication, so it is usually a better idea to don't

    • using pypy instead of cpython can be 70% faster for some workloads, but slower for many others

      • and pypy can sometimes crash on startup with -j0 (TODO make issue)

    client-side

    when uploading files,

    • when uploading from very fast storage (NVMe SSD) with chrome/firefox, enable [wasm] in the [⚙️] settings tab to more effectively use all CPU-cores for hashing

      • don't do this on Safari (runs faster without)
      • don't do this on older browsers; likely to provoke browser-bugs (browser eats all RAM and crashes)
      • can be made default-enabled serverside with --nosubtle 137 (chrome v137+) or --nosubtle 2 (chrome+firefox)

    • chrome is recommended (unfortunately), at least compared to firefox:

      • up to 90% faster when hashing, especially on SSDs
      • up to 40% faster when uploading over extremely fast internets
      • but u2c.py can be 40% faster than chrome again

    • if you're cpu-bottlenecked, or the browser is maxing a cpu core:

      • up to 30% faster uploads if you hide the upload status list by switching away from the [🚀] up2k ui-tab (or closing it)
        • optionally you can switch to the lightweight potato ui by clicking the [🥔]
        • switching to another browser-tab also works, the favicon will update every 10 seconds in that case
      • unlikely to be a problem, but can happen when uploading many small files, or your internet is too fast, or PC too slow

    security

    there is a discord server with an @everyone for all important updates (at the lack of better ideas)

    some notes on hardening

    • set --rproxy 0 if your copyparty is directly facing the internet (not through a reverse-proxy)
      • cors doesn't work right otherwise
    • if you allow anonymous uploads or otherwise don't trust the contents of a volume, you can prevent XSS with volflag nohtml
      • this returns html documents as plaintext, and also disables markdown rendering
    • when running behind a reverse-proxy, listen on a unix-socket for tighter access control (and more performance); see reverse-proxy or --help-bind

    safety profiles:

    • option -s is a shortcut to set the following options:

      • --no-thumb disables thumbnails and audio transcoding to stop copyparty from running FFmpeg/Pillow/VIPS on uploaded files, which is a good idea if anonymous upload is enabled
      • --no-mtag-ff uses mutagen to grab music tags instead of FFmpeg, which is safer and faster but less accurate
      • --dotpart hides uploads from directory listings while they're still incoming
      • --no-robots and --force-js makes life harder for crawlers, see hiding from google

    • option -ss is a shortcut for the above plus:

      • --unpost 0, --no-del, --no-mv disables all move/delete support
      • --hardlink creates hardlinks instead of symlinks when deduplicating uploads, which is less maintenance
        • however note if you edit one file it will also affect the other copies
      • --vague-403 returns a "404 not found" instead of "401 unauthorized" which is a common enterprise meme
      • -nih removes the server hostname from directory listings

    • option -sss is a shortcut for the above plus:

      • --no-dav disables webdav support
      • --no-logues and --no-readme disables support for readme's and prologues / epilogues in directory listings, which otherwise lets people upload arbitrary (but sandboxed)