Reintroduction of PleaseShare

I already talked about PleaseShare in (tw: french articles) (1, 2, 3, 4) but I might as well go along and reintroduce its objective.

The point is to leverage the capabilities of bittorent webseeds in order to create a file hosting service that:

1. Can be self-hosted
2. Can be fast while self-hosted
3. Is resilient
4. Is easy to use

The use of webseeds allows PleaseShare downloads to be at least as fast as if it was a classical HTTP download, but gets faster when more people are downloading it.

Rewrite

Even though I say “rewrite”, I could obviously keep the design, but most of the templates too, and the torrent handling code. So I only had to figure out how to do nice things with flask, like automated translation, forms, and csrf stuff.

I took the opportunity to rewrite all of the archive handling code, which was a bit broken and use python 3.4 singledispatch module, along with function annotations, to make things look cleaner.

Additions

• Translation depending of browser Accept-language. Currently only french and english are available.
• Access through a subdirectory; previously PleaseShare could only be installed to a subdomain.
• A “my uploads” page which is only valid for the session.
• A light (non-compulsory) addtition of javascript to make user experience smoother
• A new, cleaner design (thanks cynddl)

Previous features still working

Everything, which means, among others:

• Upload of (compressed or uncompressed) archives which will be extracted to create torrents
• User-added list of other trackers to use for the torrent
• User-added list of other webseeds to use for the torrent
• User choice of creating a private torrent or not
• Mandatory trackers to use when creating the torrent
• Other webseeds handled by the server (e.g. when syncing the upload directory with another server)

Links

• Project page
• Project on github, gitorious, my own git repo
• My own instance at share.jeproteste.info