Categories
Debian FreedomBox

File sharing with bepasty

One of the apps running on my FreedomBox that I use frequently is bepasty. bepasty is essentially a self-hosted, free software pastebin. It allows you to paste text, or upload any type of file. You can also set an expiration date for when the file or text will automatically be deleted. If you are uploading multiple related files, you can organize them into a list.

bepasty does not have user accounts. Instead, it has shared passwords, where each password is linked to a set of permissions. There are five permissions: Read, List, Create, Delete, and Admin. (The meanings are mostly straightforward, except for Admin, which means the ability to lock and unlock files.) This allows very fine-grained control. For example, if you want someone to be able to upload files to your bepasty, but not view or download anything, than you can generate a password with only the “Create” permission, and give this password to the person who will be uploading files.

To simplify the initial setup in FreedomBox, we generate three passwords by default: one for viewers (List and Read), one for editors (List, Read, Create, and Delete), and one for admins (all permissions). In addition, when no password has been provided, the Read (but not List) permission is provided by default. This allows files to be easily shared by sending just their URLs (and no password required). The URLs contain some random characters, so it is not easy to guess.

I mostly use bepasty for moving files between systems, whether its a physical machine or VPS, or a VM or container that I will use only briefly. Especially in the latter case, it’s nice that I don’t need to do any extra setup (such as copying SSH keys) before I copy my files over.

The bepasty package is available in Debian stable (with a newer version in stable-backports and testing). The many use-cases that it provides, and the well-maintained Debian packaging, made it a compelling choice for integration into FreedomBox, which has included bepasty for one-click installation since version 20.14.