I have a Samba mount at home (behind NAT, accessible via wireguard VPN), which works very well when accessing my home files when traveling (I travel a lot for work).
The only detail missing from this solution is sharing individual files with friends. I could give them access to my VPN, but that gives them access to everything, not just one thing I want to share. Also not all my friends are that tech savvy to manage connecting to a VPN.
What would be really great is to have a link-generator that punches a hole in the NAT to give them access to specific files. Are there any self-hosted solutions for that?
https://xkcd.com/949/ has a few good hints.
Copyparty is easy, but if you can both set up syncthing, that makes it a breeze. I have a sibling that lives across the Pacific and last time they visited I set up syncthing on their laptop and when either of us wants to share something, we just drop it in that folder and wait a minute or two.
Do you have a public-facing internet-presence? If so, then I’ve heard good things about copyparty.
I’m using Nextcloud for this, but that seems a bit overkill for your usecase.
Edit: they explain how to use a cloudflare tunnel, so no public IP needed, actually.
How do I learn all these terms?
Having come from zero knowledge, to now self-hosting for over a year, I can tell you that you just search for them one at a time. Sometimes they will make sense. Sometimes not yet.
Stick around here, ask questions, and look things up.
Just run a web server and expose the specific files you want to share through that?
Yea just draw the rest of the owl duh! 🙄
