Today someone wanted to send me a large video file (around 3 GB). Since we live about 1500 kilometers apart, but both have access to broadband, internet seemed to be the fastest solution.
Apparently Google Drive didn't accept such a large file to be uploaded.
The same issue appeared on my Nextcloud instance (hosted on some shared hosting, so I wasn't very surprised).
Trying online service like file.pizza took a while to start and actually never transfered anything.
At work, I previously set up a solution using Tus.io to allow the customers to transfer large files and resume interrupted transfers. This solution has been very reliable, even under bad network conditions.
tus.io - resumable file uploads
So I figured out, that I should set-up the same solution, even if it felt like use a sledge-hammer to crack a nut.
I first made an upload server using tusd and then I added some frontend using Uppy, which is made by the same company behind tus.
Reference server implementation in Go of tus
Uppy - modular open source JavaScript file uploader
Transloadit - the company behind tus and Uppy
And soon enough I had an http server running on my machine on port 54321, with an upload page and a tus server.
I then made a hole in my firewall and added a forwarding rule to my home router.
I finally sent the link http://[MY-IP]:54321 to the other person, who successfully uploaded the file in a couple of minutes!
One caveat, is that the name of the uploaded file is random; you can find the original name in the accompanying .info file.
Assembling the parts took me about 40 minutes, much less than all the trial and error we did before.
On one side, it feels a bit weird that such a basic problem is so hard to solve. However on the other side, establishing a direct TCP/IP connection between two home routers feels like the right solution to a transfer problem (relying on some third-party for intermediate storage is actually absurd).
If anyone wants to solve the same problem, here are my 150 lines of code (most of them are copied from the documentation of tus and uppy).
https://git.sr.ht/~oliverpool/tuspload-me
📅 2021-09-06