gone

gone is an ephemeral content hosting server written in Go.

The primary goal is to share files or text using an HTML interface or an API.

Features

• No disk storage (memory only) - content cleared on exit
• No third-party dependencies - only Go required to build
• No Javascript required to use HTML-based user interface
• Share multiple files: upload, download and list feature
• Files expire after number of downloads or time duration
• Share short text messages and shared text area for edit
• JSON-based configurations, logging and server responses
• Token (string-based) authentication and request limiter

Development

gone requires Go to develop.

Makefile provides functionality to build, run and test the application.

Build

make build

Binaries are built to the release directory for distribution and installation.

Run

make run

Debug

make debug

Install

To install as a service on systemd Linux:

make install

Output

Output is in JSON format and can be parsed with jq:

gone | jq '.message'

Settings

Default settings are embedded into the application. To make changes, copy and pass a modified settings file using -config:

gone -config mySettings.json

Set an empty handler path to disable it; for example, to turn off text features:

"paths": {
  "message": "",
  "wall": ""

Clients

A basic HTML user interface is available at the root path (/ by default) - localhost:8080 when running locally.

Features are also available using command-line programs such as curl:

Status

Get server status:

curl localhost:8080/heartbeat

Upload

Upload file:

curl -F "file=@test.txt" localhost:8080/upload

Upload multiple files:

curl -F "file=@test.txt" -F "file=@test2.txt" localhost:8080/upload

With 3 allowed downloads before file expiration:

curl -F "downloads=3" -F "file=@test.txt" localhost:8080/upload

With a 15 minutes file expiration:

curl -F "duration=15m" -F "file=@test.txt" localhost:8080/upload

List

List uploaded files:

curl localhost:8080/list

Download

Download a file (default settings require token-based authentication):

curl -H "X-Auth: mySecret" "localhost:8080/download/test.txt"

Get static (never expires) content:

curl localhost:8080/static

Message

Post a short text message (use single quotes to wrap special characters):

curl -s -F 'message=hello, world!' localhost:8080/msg >/dev/null

Wall

Post multi-line text for shared edit:

curl -s -F "wall=$(cat /etc/dnsmasq.conf)" localhost:8080/wall >/dev/null

Get shared multi-line text:

curl localhost:8080/wall | jq -r

Random

Get a random value of certain type:

curl localhost:8080/random/

curl localhost:8080/random/coin

curl localhost:8080/random/name

curl localhost:8080/random/nato

curl localhost:8080/random/number

Functions

See config/zshrc for alias and function examples, such as:

$ gonePut test.txt 3 30m
[
  {
    "name": "test.txt",
    "downloads": {
      "allow": 3
    },
    "size": "13.00 Bytes",
    "owner": {
      "address": "127.0.0.1:1234",
      "mask": "Bob123",
      "agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64)"
    },
    "time": {
      "allow": "30m0s",
      "upload": "2025-10-31T10:00:00"
    }
  }
]

Documentation

Application documentation is available with godoc:

make doc

Testing

Tests and lint are validated with a workflow on changes, or manually:

make lint

make test

make test-verbose

make test-race

Test coverage is also available - to generate an HTML report as testCoverage.html:

make cover

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