Nimbus

Nimbus is a private file sharer and URL shortener. Heavily inspired by Cloudapp, Nimbus is a free and open source solution to file sharing and URL shortening that you can host yourself and fully control.

Nimbus consists of several components:

• A website that displays sharing pages for generated links and redirects shortened URLs to their targets
• A website to manage shared items
• An API to manipulate shared items
• A Mac OS X menubar app to upload files and shorten links

The menubar app is only compatible with OS X 10.9 and up since it is written in Swift. The files are stored in Amazon S3, so you must have an AWS account.

Screenshots

Features

• Share pages that show file previews or redirect to the shortened link
  • Image file previews
  • Text file previews with automatic syntax highlighting if applicable
• Screenshots are automatically uploaded and the share link is copied to the clipboard
• Drag a file or text to the menubar icon to upload it and copy the share link to the clipboard
• Drag a URL to the menubar icon to create a shortened link and copy it to the clipboard
• Keep track of view counts for files and shortened URLS

Setup

To set up the Django app, perform the following steps on your server (assumes pip, virtualenv, and MySQL are already installed)

1. Create a virtualenv and activate it

2. Clone the repository (from here on, it is assumed that the respository's location is /usr/local/www/Nimbus)

3. While in the repository root, install the Python requirements by running

   pip install -r requirements/production.txt

4. Create a database and grant a user full access to it.

5. Follow the instructions in nimbus/settings/secret.sample.py to create a secrets file with your MySQL and Amazon S3 credentials

6. Set up the environment for the Django app by running

   export PRODUCTION=TRUE

7. Set up the database and create your user by running ./manage.py syncdb

8. Start a Django shell (./manage.py shell) and run the following commands, replacing example.com with your domain name

   from django.contrib.sites.models import Site
   Site.objects.update(name="example.com", domain="example.com")

9. Collect static files by running

   yes yes | ./manage.py collectstatic

Serving Nimbus

Make sure you have a domain name configured with the following records:

@       IN A  <IP address of your server>
api     CNAME @
account CNAME @
files   CNAME files.<your domain name>.s3.amazonaws.com.

Also make sure you have an Amazon S3 bucket called files.<your domain name>

The recommended setup for serving Nimbus is Gunicorn managed by Supervisor with nginx as a reverse proxy. Configuration requirements are as follows.

• Nginx must be listening on the subdomains account and api of your domain as well as the root domain. Forward all of this traffic to Gunicorn - the Django app handles the subdomain routing.
• The attribute client_max_body_size must be set in the nginx config to a sufficiently large value to allow uploads of big files.
• Static file requests (/static/) should be aliased to nimbus/collected_static in the repository root
• Supervisor must call the version of gunicorn in your virtualenv

Example Supervisor Configuration

[program:nimbus]
directory = /usr/local/www/Nimbus
user = nobody
command = /usr/local/virtualenvs/Nimbus/bin/gunicorn nimbus.wsgi:application --user=nobody --workers=1 --bind=127.0.0.1:8080
environment = PRODUCTION=TRUE
stdout_logfile = /var/log/sites/nimbus.gunicorn.log
stderr_logfile = /var/log/sites/nimbus.gunicorn.log
autostart = true
autorestart = true

Example Nginx Configuration

server {
    listen 80;
    server_name example.com account.example.com api.example.com;
    return 301 https://$host$request_uri;
}

server {
    listen 443 ssl;
    server_name example.com account.example.com api.example.com;

    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /usr/local/certs/example.com.crt;
    ssl_certificate_key /usr/local/certs/example.com.key;

    client_max_body_size 1024M;

    access_log /var/log/sites/nimbus.access.log;
    error_log /var/log/sites/nimbus.error.log;

    location /favicon.ico {
        alias /usr/local/www/Nimbus/nimbus/static/img/favicon.ico;
    }

    location /static/ {
        alias /usr/local/www/Nimbus/nimbus/collected_static/;
    }

    location / {
        rewrite ^/((?!(api-auth|admin))(.*))/$ /$1 permanent;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8080;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Host $host;
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_set_header X-Real-IP $remote_addr;
        proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-Proto $scheme;
    }
}

API Reference

API documentation can be found here.

Contact

Ethan Lowman

• https://github.com/ethanal
• [email protected]