publicfile home page

publicfile is a system for publishing public files. It implements an http server and ftp server. It is secure, reliable, small, fast, etc etc etc. Just like all of Dan Bernstein's tools. Dan has his own page for publicfile. We've got this one so we can distribute our enhancements to publicfile.

Dan has a mailing list for publicfile. The Aims Group has an archive.

A few people have contributed enhancements:

• Giles Lean wrote a patch which makes it send redirects instead of "404 access denied" when directories are requested without a trailing slash.
• Uwe Ohse wrote FTPcopy, a tool to mirror a publicfile site.
• Camiel Dobbelaar wrote a patch to publicfile which removes EPLF support and replaces it with a /bin/ls FTP listing, or something that looks like it anyway.
• Mark Peloquin wants his EPLF sorted.
• Uwe Ohse has a patch to get file types from a set of environment variables. This may be used very profitably with daemontools' envdir program.
• William Baxter wrote some derivative http servers based on the publicfile code. This includes a CGI server, a constant file server, and a redirect server.
• Mike DuChene has a patch to publicfile which gives it write capability under the user's uid. It uses checkpassword for authentication.
• SHINYAMA Yusuke has a patch to publicfile which also gives it write capability, but it doesn't switch userids, doesn't run as root, is chrooted, and only allows users to store a file.
• Bruce Guenter has an otherwise-unrelated ftp daemon called twoftpd which uses checkpassword for authentication. It's not a derivative of publicfile.
• Laurent G. Bercot has withdrawn skahttpd from distribution. He encourages people to use fnord instead.
• Jay Soffian has written a patch to allow for Basic Auth.
• William Baxter wrote ucspi-ssl, along with a small patch to publicfile to get it to answer https queries.
• custom error messages and directory redirection support for publicfile 0.52. Custom html pages may be displayed instead of the default one-line error messages given by default. In addition, user omission of the trailing slash has been forgiven. Read the notes located at the head of the patch.
• Tivano has three publicfile patches:

  publicfile-0.52-gzip-1.patch

  This patch enables "Content-Encoding" (gzip). If there is a compressed copy of the file available, it is returned instead of the uncompressed version, saving some bandwidth.

  publicfile-0.52-http10keepalive.patch

  This patch enables persistent connections for HTTP/1.0 requests as described in RFC 2616 section 19.6.2.

  publicfile-0.52-commonlog-2.patch

  This patch makes publicfile's httpd write additional log lines in Apache's common or combined format.

• Jeff King has written a patch to allow publicfile's content-type determining mechanism to follow symbolic links before examining a filename. The goal is to avoid ugly URLs like http://host/foo.content=type; instead, I want http://host/foo with the correct content-type.

Publicfile's ftp server uses a documented listing format which is designed to be parsed. Some ftp clients have been modified to parse this format. Some have patches to help them grokk it:

• Felix von Leitner -- ncftp-3.1.1
• Russ Nelson -- wget-1.5.2
• Martin Hedenfalk -- His Yet Another FTP Client supports EPLF natively.
• Alexander Lukyanov's lftp