Regenwolken – hosting CloudApp on your own server
28.08.2011, 14:14
CoudApp allows you to share any kind of data with your friends using Amazon S3 as backend. It provides a verbose API and has several working clients for iPhone, iPad and Android as well. Cloud.app is a really handy, extendable Mac-client leaving nothing to be desired. CloudApp offers a Pro mode, allowing you to share data up to 250 Mb and unlimited uploads as well as links to your domain. For free you’ll get 10 uploads per day and a filesize limit of 25 MiB.
I had some leisure time and found out, CloudApp’s services is similar to Facebooks privacy options. Their security/privacy (marked as “private”) relies simply on a longer hash than their (per default) public items starting as three-character hash.
I don’t read their terms of service, but I guess they are similar to DropBox;
means you have no rights on your uploaded data, Patriot Act and so on. Btw,
they’re using Pusher for whatever reason. Privacy is
not compatible with CloudApp as I’ve seen with tcpdump so far. But their
Desktop-Clients are cool (with a carrot and a stick).
Regenwolken
Regenwolken is an alternate (incomplete) server implementation written in python, bottly.py and MongoDB, which is compatible with Cloud.app (Mac-Client) and circumvents any Free/Pro restriction. Its has support for their basic, unencrypted authentication (no wait, it’s digest auth!1), unlimited file uploading, file size limit and a powerful database backend.
Regenwolken can run either as stand-alone HTTP-server on port 80 or on as unprivileged user
and using some mod_proxy-magic. Unfortunately it requires access to /etc/hosts
to redirect my.cl.ly to your own server address. This will not break any
“official” CloudApp links (cl.ly) and is only required for the upload itself.
Other people get a normal, non-/etc/hosts hacked, working link.
Regenwolken is licensed under BSD, two-clause and can be found on GitHub. Check README.md and Issues as well. Don’t expect a full featured server API yet, it’s currently 0.1-alpha.
