file_server

a self-hostable file backup server, written in rust because crabs are funny

please note that I don't know rust, which makes this project even funnier

why?

Because I wanted to. Seriously though, monetized cloud storage (and cloud storage that harvests your data or uses it to train AIs) is becoming an issue. While convenient, you're willingly submitting your data to be held hostage in the event you don't pay. You also never know where your data is, who is accessing it, and what is being done with it. I wanted to make something for myself to host my data without fear of big brother and others snooping on me or making me pay a fee to access it.

features

• free (as in beer, duh)
• self hostable on lower end devices (I run mine on a raspberry pi 3B)
• flexible search and tagging functionality
• well documented api via openapi docs
• flexible (but simple!) config
• portable - you can zip up the entire directory the server is running in, unzip it on a new device, and it will run fine (though you may need to change your certificates). This makes manual backups easy

I've chosen to write this in rust with sqlite for the speed and lightness of both of those technologies. I also thought it'd be a fun project for a language I never got to use but enjoyed the syntax of.

building

supported rustc version: 1.88.0

This project might be able to run on windows, but it is primarily designed to run on a linux installation. No guarantees are made about windows.

For building on linux, gcc is required to build sqlite. You will also need to add the aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu target using the command if you want to cross-compile for a raspberry pi.

rustup target add aarch64-unknown-linux-gnu

Also for cross-compiling to raspi, you will need to install aarch64 gcc. On ubuntu, you can do so with the command

sudo apt install gcc-aarch64-linux-gnu

Running

cargo run

preview generation for file uploads requires ffmpeg and rabbitmq to be running on your machine. Running docker compose up in the project root directory will start up a docker with rabbit, and create an admin user with username admin and password admin. To turn off this feature, set RabbitMq.enabled to false in FileServer.toml

Testing

• some tests require ffmpeg to run (specifically all tests for generating file previews)
• the same tests require these files located in ./test_assets: test.png, test.gif, test.mp4 They are ignored from git to reduce repository size and because I don't want to be liable if it turns out test data I used is copyrighted

notes

generating file previews requires rabbitmq to be running when this application starts. Timing can vary depending on your device, but here's an example script that can guide you in booting up properly (works great in /etc/rc.local):

sudo rabbitmq-server &
# for lower end hardware, we'll need to wait before listening for a node. you may need to adjust the timing
sleep 45
sudo rabbitmqctl await_online_nodes 1 && $(./sudo file_server &) &

you can also use systemd to ensure this launches after rabbit