bgenc.net/content/posts/bulgur-cloud-intro.md

---
title: An introduction to Bulgur Cloud - simple self hosted cloud storage
date: 2022-03-29
---

> This post is day 8 of me taking part in the
> [#100DaysToOffload](https://100daystooffload.com/) challenge.

I've been recently working on Bulgur Cloud, a self hosted cloud storage
software. It's essentially Nextcloud, minus all the productivity software. It's
also designed to be much simpler, using no databases and keeping everything on
disk.

The software is still too early to actually demo, but the frontend is at a point
where I can show some features off. So I wanted to show it off.

![A white web page with the words "Bulgur Cloud". Below is "Simple and delicious cloud storage and sharing". Under that are two fields titled "Username" and "Password", and a black button titled "Login".](/img/2022-03-29-00-17-38.png)

I've been going for a clean "print-like" look. I think it's going pretty well so far.

![A web page with 3 files listed, "sprite-fright.mp4", "test.txt", and "sprite-fright.LICENSE.txt". There are pencil and thrash bin symbols to the right of the file names. A leftward arrow is grayed out on the top left, and top right says "kaan". On the bottom right there's a symbol of a cloud with an up arrow.](/img/2022-03-29-00-16-13.png)

I'm not sure about the details of how the directory listing will look. I don't
think I like the upload button in the corner, and the rename and delete icons
feel like they would be easy to mis-press. There is a confirmation before
anything is actually deleted, but it still would be annoying.

![A pop up that says "Delete file "text.txt", with the buttons "Delete" and "Cancel" below it.](/img/2022-03-29-00-20-48.png)

Something I'm pretty happy with is the file previews. I've added support for
images, videos, and PDFs. Video support is restricted by whatever formats are
supported by your browser, the server doesn't do any transcoding, but I think
it's still very useful for a quick preview. I'm also planning on support for
audio files. The server supports range requests, so you can seek around in the
video without waiting to download everything (although I've found that Firefox
doesn't handle that very well).

![A page with the text "sprite-fright.mp4", and a video player below showing a frame from the movie. Below the player is a link that says "Download this file".](/img/2022-03-29-00-22-48.png)

This is a web interface only so far, but I'm planning to add support for mobile
and desktop apps eventually. I've been building the interface with React Native
so adding mobile/desktop support shouldn't be too difficult, but I've been
finding that "write once, run everywhere" isn't always that simple. I ended up
having to add web-only code to support stuff like the video and PDF previews, so
I'll have to find replacements for some parts. Mobile and desktop apps natively
support more video and audio formats too, and with native code you usually have
the kind of performance to transcode video if needed.

The backend is written in Rust with `actix-web`, using async operations. It's
incredibly fast, and uses a tiny amount of resources (a basic measurement
suggests < 2 MB of memory used). I'm pretty excited about it!

After a few more features (namely being able to move files), I'm planning to put
together a demo to show this off live! The whole thing will be open source, but
I'm waiting until it's a bit more put together before I make the source public.
The source will go live at the same time as the demo.