PostIt file sharing server

PostIt is designed to work as a temporary public storage for text (and other) files uploaded to it by software that need a publicly reachable page without hosting its own server or even having a public IP.

The primary use case is to share diagnostic and contextual information produced by Fediverse bots (think an interactive game where the game board is rendered to an image or text file on demand). There are sure to be many other uses I didn't think of.

The uploaded files have a lifetime of 10 minutes, which can be shortened or extended up to 1 hour (or more, as configured).

Uploading a file

To upload a file, send a POST request to the running PostIt server.

$ curl -X POST --data-binary @RICKROLL.txt 0.0.0.0:7745 -i
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
X-Secret: 5273d775746e393b
X-Expire: 599
Content-Length: 16

421d082ef85827ea

Take note of the X-Secret header, you will need it to update or delete the file.

If you only want to share the file, this is all you need. Grab the file ID from the response body and share it. The URL is /<FILE_ID>, e.g.

$ curl -X GET 0.0.0.0:7745/421d082ef85827ea -i
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf8
X-Expire: 459
Content-Length: 688

File content here...

Content type

The server attempts to auto-detect the file's Content-Type. The fallback is text/plain. If you wish to set a custom type, use the Content-Type header when uploading the file, e.g.

$ curl -X POST --data-binary @RICKROLL.txt 0.0.0.0:7745 -i -H 'Content-Type: application/json'

Expiration time

To customize the expiration time, use the header X-Expire: <seconds>, or a GET argument ?expire=<seconds> e.g.

$ curl -X POST --data-binary @RICKROLL.txt 0.0.0.0:7745 -i -H 'X-Expire: 60'

Updating a file

A file you uploaded can be deleted or modified using the secret token obtained in respose to its upload. Send the token as the X-Secret header, or GET argument ?secret=....

File is updated by sending a PUT request to the file's URL.

The PUT request can change file expiration (X-Expire: <secs> or GET arg expire), update its Content-Type, or replace its content.

Note that sending PUT with empty body will not clear the file, in that case the file content is not changed at all. This can be used to extend file's expiration without changing it in any other way (by sending the X-Expire header).

Deleting a file

The DELETE verb, unsurprisingly, deletes a file. As with PUT, the secret token is required.

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