gone

Design

gone is an ephemeral content hosting server written in Go.

The primary goal is to enable sharing of files and text using command-line API or simple HTML user interface.

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.

Build

To build on Linux:

make build

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

Run

To run on Linux:

make run

Debug

To run in debug mode on Linux:

make debug

Output

Application output is structured in JSON format and can be parsed with jq for convenience, for example:

./gone | jq .data

The optional -debug flag can be used for debug mode (provides additional application output).

Configuration

gone uses an embedded JSON-based configuration defaultSettings.json as default settings.

To change application settings, copy the default settings JSON file and use the -config flag:

./gone -config=mySettings.json

Client

The server provides a basic user interface for uploading, downloading and listing files at the default path (/):

localhost:8080

All 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 file (the default configuration requires basic authentication):

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

Get static (never expires) content:

curl localhost:8080/static

Message

Post a 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/name

curl localhost:8080/random/nato

curl localhost:8080/random/number

curl localhost:8080/random/coin

Functions

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

$ gone_put test.txt 1 20m
[
  {
    "name": "test.txt",
    "downloads": {
      "allow": 1
    },
    "size": "6.00 Bytes",
    "owner": {
      "address": "127.0.0.1:4306",
      "agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/132.0.0.0 Safari/537.3"
    },
    "time": {
      "allow": "20m0s",
      "upload": "2025-04-22T10:00:00"
    }
  }
]

Documentation

Application documentation is available with godoc:

make doc

Testing

Unit tests are validated by a workflow on repository changes. They can also be run manually:

make test

make test-verbose

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

make cover

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