sexnine / downcat

A simple cross-platform remote file management tool to upload and download files over HTTP/S - Alternative to Updog

Downcat

A simple cross-platform remote file management tool to upload and download files over HTTP/S

📜 License	✨ Features	🎉 Install	🎁 Releases

✨ Features

⚡ Fast - Quick startup, performant API

✨ Easy to install - No dependencies^*, just one command

🗂 Upload and download files easily - Using HTTP/S with a sexy web UI

🌈 Cross platform - Windows, Linux and macOS support

^{*Except for unzip to extract the executable from the archive}

🎉 Install

Automated install (Linux only)

⚠ You should not run scripts off the internet without checking them first. You can view the install script here.

You can run an automated install of downcat using the command below. It is highly recommended you run it as root to avoid any permissions-related problems.

curl -sSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sexnine/downcat/main/install/downcat_linux.sh | sudo bash

Manual install

1. Download the latest binary from the releases tab
2. Unzip the file
3. Place the executable into your path
4. Make it executable
5. Run with downcat

Build it yourself

See 🏗 Building and other info under ⚙ Development and follow steps 3-5 just above.

🤔 Usage

Run downcat to serve your current directory and then open the link in your browser

~$ downcat
🐈 Starting downcat...

✅ Downcat v0.3.2 running!
✨ Listening on http://192.168.0.23:3030/

See extra options by viewing the help with downcat -h or downcat --help

You can update downcat to the latest available version using downcat update

Downcat is not meant to be used as a web server. It is meant to be used as a quick and easy file management utility for when you quickly need to up/download a file from a server.

💎 All options

Argument	Description	Default Value
-h, --help	Shows help message
-V, --version	Shows version
--disable-update-check	Disables update check on startup	Check for updates
-p, --port <port>	Port to listen on	3030
--ssl	Enables SSL (Recommended)	Off
-P, --password <password>	Sets a password for accessing downcat and the APIs (Recommended). Will need to reauthenticate when restarting downcat, even when using the same password.	None
-b, --bind <host>	The IP to listen on	Local IP (or 0.0.0.0 if couldn't get local IP)

🛠 Development

📜 Prerequisites	NodeJS & NPM	Rust & Cargo

• Clone the repo git clone https://github.com/sexnine/downcat.git
• Go into the project's directory cd downcat/

⚙ Installing Dependencies

• Go into the frontend directory cd frontend/
• Install NPM dependencies with npm i
• Rust dependencies will automatically install when building or running the project with cargo build & cargo run respectively.

▶ Running

Frontend

• Go into the frontend directory cd frontend/
• Run the dev server with npm run dev. The dev server supports hot reloading.
• Modify the API endpoint in .env.development if you need to.

Note: While developing, the frontend and backend should be run separately. When building a release version, the frontend's files will be embedded into the rust binary.

Backend

• Simply run with cargo run in the project root.

🏗 Building

1. Build the frontend
   1. Go into the frontend directory cd frontend/
   2. Install dependencies if you haven't already with npm i
   3. Build the frontend with npm run build
2. Build using cargo build --release

🛣 Roadmap

• Retrieve Files and Folders v0.1.0
  • Get metadata v0.1.0
  • Sort file list v0.1.0
  • Search file list v0.3.2
  • Enhanced File Icons
  • Download multiple files
  • Directory History v0.1.0
• Uploading Files v0.3.0
  • Uploading multiple files v0.3.2
  • Uploading Folders
• Managing Files/Folders
  • Renaming
  • Deleting
  • Moving
  • Copying
• SSL v0.2.0
  • Optionally enable SSL using --ssl flag
• Password Authentication v0.1.0
• Updater v0.2.0
  • Checks for updates v0.2.0
  • downcat update to perform a self-update v0.2.0
• Cross Platform support
  • Windows
  • Linux
  • MacOS v0.3.1
• Allow downcat to access any directory
  • With the --any flag, downcat will be able to access any directory or files it has permissions to

❤ Acknowledgements

• @sc0tfree for the original inspiration for this project (updog)
• @jethr0-1 (jethro#1547 on Discord) for making a Linux install script for downcat

Made with 💖 by sexnine

downcat's Issues

Unable to download more than 6 files at once.

Unable to download more than 6 files at once, most likely due to not being enough threads, makes all other requests unresponsive which makes the app feel very slow and sometimes unable to navigate directories while downloading many files at once.

Possible solutions might include:

• Adding a download queue on the frontend.
• Leaving at least 1 thread free from uploading and downloading so the backend is still responsive
• Creating new threads for more downloads/uploads

Docker Image

Plans for a docker image?

Loads whole file into memory while uploading to backend

Especially when uploading large files on memory-limited systems, the backend will try allocating a lot of memory for the file and can panic if there is not enough memory, causing the upload to be incomplete and downcat to crash.

For some reason, the file's data is not being freed from memory until the whole file has been written to disk.

Possible solutions for this issue:

• Freeing memory while parts of the file is written
• Limiting the request so only a certain amount can be in memory at one time.

Unfortunately, I've tried to implement these solutions but I'm too dumb to solve them :)

Downcat Missing libssl.so.1.1

When trying to run after using automatic install, it give me the error of
downcat: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
which installing libssl-dev or openssl does not fix.

Add build option to disable self-update entirely

A build option that will fully disable self-update and references to self-updating.
This is necessary to make a docker build (#1) as self-updating won't be available in the docker build.