57 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
57 lines
2.8 KiB
Markdown
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---
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title: An introduction to Bulgur Cloud - simple self hosted cloud storage
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date: 2022-03-29
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---
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> This post is day 8 of me taking part in the
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> [#100DaysToOffload](https://100daystooffload.com/) challenge.
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I've been recently working on Bulgur Cloud, a self hosted cloud storage
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software. It's essentially Nextcloud, minus all the productivity software. It's
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also designed to be much simpler, using no databases and keeping everything on
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disk.
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The software is still too early to actually demo, but the frontend is at a point
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where I can show some features off. So I wanted to show it off.
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I've been going for a clean "print-like" look. I think it's going pretty well so far.
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I'm not sure about the details of how the directory listing will look. I don't
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think I like the upload button in the corner, and the rename and delete icons
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feel like they would be easy to mis-press. There is a confirmation before
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anything is actually deleted, but it still would be annoying.
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Something I'm pretty happy with is the file previews. I've added support for
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images, videos, and PDFs. Video support is restricted by whatever formats are
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supported by your browser, the server doesn't do any transcoding, but I think
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it's still very useful for a quick preview. I'm also planning on support for
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audio files. The server supports range requests, so you can seek around in the
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video without waiting to download everything (although I've found that Firefox
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doesn't handle that very well).
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This is a web interface only so far, but I'm planning to add support for mobile
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and desktop apps eventually. I've been building the interface with React Native
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so adding mobile/desktop support shouldn't be too difficult, but I've been
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finding that "write once, run everywhere" isn't always that simple. I ended up
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having to add web-only code to support stuff like the video and PDF previews, so
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I'll have to find replacements for some parts. Mobile and desktop apps natively
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support more video and audio formats too, and with native code you usually have
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the kind of performance to transcode video if needed.
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The backend is written in Rust with `actix-web`, using async operations. It's
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incredibly fast, and uses a tiny amount of resources (a basic measurement
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suggests < 2 MB of memory used). I'm pretty excited about it!
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After a few more features (namely being able to move files), I'm planning to put
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together a demo to show this off live! The whole thing will be open source, but
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I'm waiting until it's a bit more put together before I make the source public.
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The source will go live at the same time as the demo.
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