File download via url

[Eddy2909 (Adrian)]

hi guys! what about some feature like "https://whatever.com:12345/dl?file=whatever.pdf&folder=whatever&hash=gz7z8hi8z9he9fh3b4

would this be complicated to implement?

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

It’s been discussed a few times, here and on Github. It’s out of scope for Syncthing. Here are some links to get you started.

File Access API

I don’t think Syncthing currently has API endpoints to access file contents. Mainstream alternatives, however, do have these capabilities (DropBox and Google Drive). Providing such an API will allow developers to easily create applications on top of Syncthing that use Syncthing as their content storage system. Is such an API currently in consideration? In development maybe?

How do you share your files?

Hi there. I would like to totally replace my Dropbox with syncthing. The syncing-files part is OK, I have my personal server, computer, laptop and phone, syncing files really well and nice. But dropbox also allows me to easily share files over web from given URL, with nice image viewers, gallery viewers, file previews etc. For example when I want to quickly share some pictures with friends, or video - it can even be played in browser etc. I have a web server accessible over internet, I could …

[Eddy2909 (Adrian)]

I know - I already installed pydio for that purpose but got some right problems And honestly I don’t know why using a “third” party tool, when using syncthing for up- & download and syncing

[calmh (Jakob Borg)]

I think I’ve explained why a few times already in those threads…

[canton7 (Antony Male)]

To add some extra thoughts:

Syncthing can establish a connection so long as one of the parties can establish a connection to another. This means that one of the two devices can be completely inaccessible from the outside world (e.g. UPnP is unavailable, no port forwarding), and a connection can still be established.

A direct file download will require that a connection to the machine hosting the download can be established, which is less of a sure thing. You might have a situation where two devices can successfully synchronise, but you can’t download from one of them: that’s going to confuse people. Dropbox gets away with it because it’s centralised: there’s always an online central server. Syncthing doesn’t have that luxury (by design).

Similarly, Syncthing copes with devices going offline, and that’s fine. A direct file download won’t cope.

Now, the more Syncthing-esque way to do this would be to have folders (or individual files within folders) that can be shared (i.e. synced to Syncthing devices) without explicit permission being given: just having a magic number is enough. BTSync allows this. There have been discussions on this in the past: dig through the forums or github issues.

[jarble]

Syncthing already has a web GUI with a web server. We could download files from this server if it supported file URLs.