What does HackerNews think of filestash?

```

interface IBackend {

   ls(path)            []file

   cat(path)           stream

   save(path, stream)

   rm(path)

   mv(from, to)

   mkdir(path)

```

So I open source my work [2] as a result of that thought experiment. Almost 7k github star later, there's about 40k users who use my tool every month to access their FTP server, SFTP server, S3, WebdAV and more protocols and was contacted by people in places I would have never dream like NASA and MIT.

That project is a few order of magnitude more impact full than anything I've done in my professional life and I'm super excited to the prospect of developing the idea further as file manager are an amazing abstraction. My mum can navigate through folders and click on files but I would have a hard to time to explain her what a tree is and a lot of complex system can be model as simple file managers. A good example which was implemented in Filestash [3] is a relational database, the db can be modeled as different folders, tables as subfolders and rows as file which can be edited and save back which would under the hood simply generate a bunch of sql queries

There's still a lot to do but at this stage, it doesn't make enough money to make it a full time job yet.

I learned how to code from a massive rabbit hole that started in high school while trying to make myspace pages look nice

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[2] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

[3] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/master/ser...

Organice - https://github.com/200ok-ch/organice

org-web - https://github.com/DanielDe/org-web

Org Mode tools! - https://orgmode.org/worg/org-tools/index.html

Connect to a machine running emacs with an in browser terminal - https://xtermjs.org

Alternatively use ssh in an actual terminal instead of the browser.

This is the comment that got me onto thinking: "how awesome would it be to have a software capable of decoupling the UI from the actual storage" so you wouldn't be tied to one vendor and do so by implementing a simple programming interface [2]

I did open source my solution [3] and have refined it over the year with plugins that implement storage for any storage you could think of like SFTP, S3, Samba, WebDAV and many more. Most of the money is coming from enterprise who need help to join authentication, authorisation and storage in 1 complete solution to do things like SAML based SSO on S3, 2FA layer on a samba server, audit capabilities, ....

The part i'm super proud of is it feel faster to browse Dropbox from my app than it is from Dropbox itself [4]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863

[2] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/a91df1637d...

[3] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

[4] the technic that's used consist in caching the list of files/folder in indexDB and render the content of a folder with the data coming from indexDB first then refresh it with the new data essentially making a visit to an folder you've seen before be instant without any loading whatsoever. It's very simple but it seems nobody else is doing it

[1] https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash

[2] https://www.mysqltutorial.org/mysql-sample-database.aspx

1. a cronjob on my android phone (via termux) does an rsync to a VPS

2. the VPS has a cronjob to sync everything with S3

3. the frontoffice tool for people to access those photos is my open source Dropbox like frontend that is bring your own backend: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash My wife and I got an account and family members can access it through shared links.

The S3 bill goes to a shared account so that If I die, the VPS will probably be quickly removed but S3 should stay in there with my wife paying for it.

FTP is amazing on so many perspective. About a month ago, I crawled the entire IPv4 range looking for anonymous FTP and found about 200k of them. As I wanted to publish the results and provide a way to get through those servers, I ended up building crawlers but quickly stopped as the sheer amount of movies, series, music I found would have been more problems than it's worth.

I made that cool frontend for FTP server with an interesting twist as I've abstracted:

1. the backend storage: meaning it connects to a wide range of existing storage like FTP, SFTP, S3, Dropbox, ...

2. the authentication layer: meaning you can use your own identity provider to put your S3 buckets behind your corporate SSO

3. the authorization layer to create business rules

At its core, the software is a framework to develop file manager like web applications by implementing a simple interface (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/f7a4e52703...). This does enable all sort of interesting use case. For example, the mysql implementation shows database name as first level folder, tables as second level folders and each row in a table is shown as a file within the table folder which a user can edit directly through the generated form built from the schema information. That way people who are used to the Dropbox interface can edit the database directly, create shared links, search through stuff without having to know about sql

Most of the money comes from companies who needed various degree of customisation and support or didn't want to host on premise.

That's surprising, I did solve the same problem for my org-mode client (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash) but using the full text search capabilities of sqlite. I was amazed by its performance, not sluggish at all and could handle anything I'd throw at it, especially with a number of files that doesn't go much above the thousand. Here is what the code look like from a sqlite perspective: https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash/blob/f5f0f30cea...