This looks great, nothing to check it out.
this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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I'll have to say that this is about one of the most detailed instructions I've seen, replete with copious screenshots. I'm going to have to give it a go just based on that. LOL
You made this on your phone on the bus ride to and from work.
I cleaned the cat box yesterday and considered that an accomplishment.
Fuck.
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Clearly a labour of love 👍
Maybe support for some music streaming apps (subsonic?) would be cool?
That's a neat idea -- I've heard that a lot of stuff uses the subsonic API under the hood, so I'll see what it would take to become compatible with that. At first glance it looks like I'd have to mine and index way more information about audio files, but could still be doable :>
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Hey fellow scener, cool project!
Just a few thoughts/questions:
- BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.
- Why have it be one huge python source file? This is a serious code smell imo, and something you really should avoid doing as this can be a major maintenance burden.
BTRFS and ZFS support real deduplication via copy on write, and would eliminate all current disadvantages of symlink and hardlink deduplication. It just works.
yeah that's a good point, I'll add an option to take advantage of this if you know you're running on a filesystem where that works as intended.
Why have it be one huge python source file?
oh don't worry, it's all separate files during development -- there's a build-stage which bundles everything up into a single file for distribution. But thanks for the concern :D
Ah, so you have compiled it into one file? Didn't know that was possible for python, what tool do you use for this?
sooo this is one of the things that started with someone saying "wouldn't it be funny if..."
if you open copyparty-sfx.py in a text editor, you'll see how -- but please make sure to use an editor which is able to handle about 600 KiB of comments which contain invalid utf8 / binary garbage 😁
I ended up rolling my own packer since I wanted optimal encoding efficiency, and everything I could find would do stuff like base85 or ucs2 tricks, but it turns out python is perfectly happy with binary garbage in comments if you declare that the file is latin-1 so it realizes all hope is lost :D
the only drawback of the sfx.py is that it needs to extract to $TEMP before running, so that's the slight advantage of the zipapp (the .pyz alternative), but that suffers from some performance reduction in return, and is more hermetic (doesn't let you swap out the bundled dependencies with fresh versions as easily if necessary)
Ah, reminds me of the old self-extracting gzip executable trick. I used that once a very long time ago to make a 4k linux intro, before I realized to be competitive I should switch to windows to be able to use Crinkler, which is superior even though the decompressor is part of the executable.
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The fact you mention security features, without ever saying it's 'super secure' tells me you know a lot about what you're doing. I'm so sick of apps like this that start with "most secure app on the net" but you know they're delusional. Thank you, going to check this out.
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you even mention ladybird as browser, nice 😎
it's such an impressive project! Amazing what they've accomplished in so little time, and so important too -- we need as many options as we can get.
I agree but it's still in an early development state. Not really usable for everyday work let alone most people never heard about it 😅 But yeah still cool to mention it under "modern" browsers. I wish them good luck with the first alpha next year. I hope it'll be successful.
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Oh my god, this seems really good and closer to what I want than anything yet. Been looking for something to replace Nextcloud and found nothing good so I might take a look at this.
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I would probably remove python 2 support, it was end of life when the project was started.
As long as it's not causing any issues or drawbacks for modern python versions (and it isn't), I don't see any reason to do that -- on the contrary, I know people are running copyparty on retro equipment, so I'd very much prefer to keep it for as long as possible :>
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This looks great but I really wish it had SFTP.
thanks for the vote, I hear ya :>
I have a question, and I want to emphasise thar this is not criticism but a request for dive into technicalities.
In the video you mentioned copyparty has an one-way sync tool. Is there a good reason why it's not two-way, or is this just something you weren't motivated to do?
No worries, good question :>
The problem with bidirectional filesync is that it's an absolutely massive can of worms, very easy to mess up, and the consequences of messing up are usually the worst kind (loss of data). There's an insane amount of edgecases to keep in mind, and you need to get every edgecase right every single time, otherwise you might wipe someone's vacation photos, or suddenly downgrade someone's keepass database to an older version... And stuff like syncing multiple devices to the same server makes it balloon further.
I've started becoming more confident in copyparty's filesystem-index database, but it's still just a hint/guideline, with the filesystem being the only source of truth -- it's still not something I'd trust with tracking sync-state against one or more clients.
The bigger guys who offer bidirectional sync (nextcloud, syncthing, etc.) have spent years perfecting their logic, so I'd like to leave this in their capable hands.
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Oh my gawd what a README!! I'm on my phone and I was trying to scroll back to the top of it from the bottom and I just kept on scrolling... Holy shit I'm going to put this on my kanban board give it proper attention
At this rate might be faster to read code than a read me. Or convert to a wiki style if this much details are really needed.
I'm properly in awe at this project. Not only does it support a wide range of protocols and runs practically everywhere, but it can play audio, video, display images and has keyboard shortcut support ???
It's got everything I could think about and so much more.
I can't wait to try it out !
Thank you so much for your time and for making this open source.
Thanks a lot for the kind words! ready to answer questions if you hit any bumps :>
Great job on something like this! I'll probably give it a whirl soon, I like Nextcloud but find it clunky sometimes because it's often a bit more than I need. Maybe breaking it up into Immich + this would help! Thank you for sharing your project!
One thing to note, your comparison against Nextcloud has a partially-incorrect point regarding file upload max size. The client does upload chunking, so is unaffected by the Cloudflare issue as well, but I believe the web client is still affected, just not the apps. https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/latest/admin_manual/configuration_files/big_file_upload_configuration.html#adjust-chunk-size-on-nextcloud-side
I suspect a few others may be as well, but I'm only familiar with the Nextcloud one because that's what I've been running, and discovered in making sure I could still upload video files recorded while out and about.
Also love that it looks like a simpler install!
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Look cool! I think you should consider putting a screenshot of the UI somewhere near the top of the README
There is a link to a live demo pretty close to the top.
Sometimes I feel so new to setting up my own digital ecosystem because I look at a thing and think "that's so cool" but struggle to imagine it at home. So could someone help me understand.
This would be a replacement for something like Google Drive or Proton Drive? The actions I would use this for would be:
- sending files to friends
- managing a collection of files like PDFs, music, ISO's that could be accessible by my friends (or just my household)
So I would spin this up on my NAS or my main PC and replace those services and accomplish those actions using this software?
Are there other services or actions I'm missing? Am I misunderstanding the premise entirely?
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Alright, you bought me with this
Amazing presentation and nice that you have a demo!
Elderly raspberry pi B [✓]
Large portable drive gathering dust [✓]
Guess I'm setting up a locally hosted file server in the near future.
I've been using copyparty for months, and it's just been an absolute gem. and the fact there are even iOS shortcuts to upload things you stumble across while doomscrolling is just icing on top.
Very sleek project. The language switcher bit was brilliant hahaha. Seriously, good job.
Haven't looked at the project yet, but that's just the greatest name for a fileserver...