gone is an ephemeral content server written in Go.

The primary goal is to share files and text using an HTML interface and API.

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 plain-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.

Makefile provides functionality to build, run and test the application.

Build

make build

Binaries are built to the release directory.

Run

make run

Debug

make debug

Install (Linux)

Install as a service on systemd Linux:

make install

Output

Output is in JSON format and can be parsed with jq:

gone | jq '.message'

Configuration

Default settings are embedded into the application. To configure, pass a modified settings file using -config or -settings:

gone -config mySettings.json

Set an empty handler path to disable it; for example, to turn off text features:

"paths": {
  "message": "",
  "wall": ""

Clients

A basic HTML user interface is available at the root path (/ by default) - 127.0.0.1:8080 when running locally.

Features are also available using command-line programs such as curl:

Status

Get server status:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/status

Get user request information:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/user

Upload

Upload file:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/upload -F "[email protected]"

Upload multiple files:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/upload -F "[email protected]" -F "[email protected]"

Upload file with 5 downloads allowed:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/upload -F "downloads=5" -F "[email protected]"

Upload file with 5 minute expiration:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/upload -F "duration=5m" -F "[email protected]"

List

List uploaded files:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/list

Download

Download a file (default settings require token-based authentication):

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/download/example.txt -H "X-Auth: mySecret"

Get static (never expires) content:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/static

Message

Post a plain-text message (use single quotes to wrap special characters):

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/msg -d 'message=hello, world!'

Get message text only:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/msg | jq '.[].data'

Wall

Post multi-line text for shared edit:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/wall -F "wall=$(cat /etc/resolv.conf)"

Get shared multi-line text:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/wall | jq -r

Random

Get random values of certain type:

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/coin

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/hex

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/id

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/mask

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/name

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/nato

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/number

curl 127.0.0.1:8080/random/pass

Functions

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

$ gonePut test.txt 3 30m
[
  {
    "id": "1J81kxgMK0JEJa5VpMb7AJJvwutwaq7bhV26xtEaFL4w",
    "name": "test.txt",
    "sum": "4dca0fd5f424a31b03ab807cbae77eb32bf2d089eed1cee154b3afed458de0dc",
    "downloads": {
      "allow": 3
    },
    "size": "14 bytes",
    "type": "text/plain; charset=utf-8",
    "owner": {
      "address": "127.0.0.1:12345",
      "mask": "Bob123",
      "agent": "curl/8.7.1"
    },
    "time": {
      "allow": "30m0s",
      "upload": "2026-05-20T12:00:00.00000-00:00"
    }
  }
]

Documentation

Application documentation is available with godoc:

make doc

Testing

Tests and lint are validated with a workflow on changes, or manually:

make lint

make test

make test-verbose

make test-race

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

make cover

Container

The application can run in a container using Dockerfile

On macOS, using apple/container:

make build-container

make run-container

Get the server IP address:

container ls | grep gone | grep --color --text -Eo "([0-9]{1,3}\.){3}[0-9]{1,3}"

curl 192.168.64.3:8080