SOLVED Does Surfer support symbolic links?

[gdeflaux]

Hi,

I was hoping to use the Surfer app to copy files between data directories of several applications. The use case I am trying to set up is as follows:

• Use Simple torrent to download video files
• Create symlinks from the Surfer data directory to the data directory of Simple Torrent and Jellyfin
• Connect to Surfer to move video files between the Download directory of Simple Torrent to the movie library directory of Jellyfin.

After creating the symlinks, Surfer stops displaying the list of files in its data directory. If I remove them, the other files reappear in Surfer.

Does Surfer support symbolic links? Or is this issue related to some containerization? Or something else?

Any help appreciated!

Thanks,

Guillaume

[mehdi]

I agree, Jellyfin and torrent apps on cloudron are quite hard to use at the moment, because of file sharing problems.

That's why I created River : https://git.cloudron.io/mehdi/river/

It's a cloudron app that packages Transmission, SickChill, CouchPotato, and Jellyfin, plus a simple file manager, in a single app. Looks like exactly what you're looking for !

[girish]

@gdeflaux said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

Does Surfer support symbolic links? Or is this issue related to some containerization? Or something else?

Because of the containerization, each app is sandboxed it's own filesystem and thus cannot see each other's files. Currently, there is no solution/workaround for this other than copying files around manually, unfortunately.

I think we initially thought web apps will provide some APIs and talk to each other via APIs and that's the "future". However, many apps still require sharing files via the file system. I will add this for investigation for the next release..

[gdeflaux]

@mehdi Thanks! I'll look into it.

@girish Thanks for the note. Keep us posted on how the investigation goes. It would surely be super useful!

Cheers,

[Joanfercal]

@mehdi Sorry to ask in this thread, but I don't see any River specific page.
I just tried it, and all the apps work fine, but my admin account was not made an admin in Jellyfin so I'm unable to modify libraries, settings or manually scan my files. (Also tried the default admin for the Jellyfin app but it didn't work)

Could you help me with the default admin account credentials, or some way to create a new one?

Thanks!

[mehdi]

@Joanfercal That's not the expected behaviour. Your Cloudron admin users should be admins in Jellyfin, and should have access to SickChill and Couchpotato, whereas regular users should not. Do you have access to SickChill and Couchpotato ?

[mehdi]

@Joanfercal I can confirm I see the same problem on a fresh install. Must be caused by a recent update to the Jellyfin Ldap plugin. I missed it because on my instance, since my admin user already existed on the Jellyfin side prior to the update, it kept the Admin flag Investigating now

[Joanfercal]

@mehdi Yes, I do have access to both apps, but the Jellyfin app does not show the admin options (Dashboard and metadata)

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon could we get symlinks working in Surfer just for symlinks to other folders within Surfer itself (not to files in another app).

e.g. on library.uniteddiversity.coop I've got a /Cooperatives/ directory which I like having at the top level, but really it's just a symlink to /Money_and_Economics/Cooperatives/ but I don't seem to be able to have the same on Surfer.

[nebulon]

I think this should be possible. Which way did you even upload the symlink? Or was this done manually via the webterminal into the app instance?

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon first of all I was just dragging folders on my local machine between the mounted servers, but then I was getting errors like this:

Which is in part my I started trying to do us using rsync instead, but then couldn't actually work out how to get that working either...

[girish]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

I think this should be possible

Won't think be quite tricky? It has to be /app/data/public/... or something in the filesystem and this is not exposed to the user (in surfer).

[nebulon]

There are more than one areas here. For one having symlinks contained within /app/data/public which I think can be made to work, have to check if expressjs already has support for that with path checks.

Now if webdav supports creating symlinks I am not sure yet.

The cli tool nor the webinterface have support to create/update them also.

Given all that, I am not sure if symlinks are a huge use-case for surfer as such.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

Now if webdav supports creating symlinks I am not sure yet.

I think perhaps it doesn't

Out of interest I just tried Right-click -> Create link on my webdav mounted Nextcloud in Gnome file manager and got this:

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon if we can't get symlinks to work in Surfer, is there some way I can do a redirect from:

http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Cooperatives/*

to

http://library.uniteddiversity.coop/Money_and_Economics/Cooperatives/*

Because I'd really rather not have lots of broken links (all the times I've linked to thinks in the /Cooperatives/ folder) out there

[robi]

I just did some testing with links and it's odd.

I made a dir called f2/ and put a file there.
visiting the site with ../f2 gives a 404

Seems listing directories are broken too.

open terminal and:
ln -s f2 f1 404
ln -s /app/data/public/f2 f1 404
ln -s /app/data/public/f2 /app/data/public/f0 404

So visiting /images/ & /assets/ 404

But index.html pulls files from those directories just fine.

[nebulon]

So besides the webdav issue, I am not actually sure what the symlink issue is.

At least in my tests symlinks (contained within the /app/data/public folder) created via the webterminal into the app work normally.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

At least in my tests symlinks (contained within the /app/data/public folder) created via the webterminal into the app work normally.

Great to hear, thanks, I'll give that a go!

[jdaviescoates]

@jdaviescoates said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

Great to hear, thanks, I'll give that a go!

Yep, worked fine!

I wonder why rsync wasn't able to create them (I guess perhaps because when it was trying to create the links the originals weren't there to link to yet - although still a bit odd that it gave errors saying symlinks not supported).

Now just need folder and file listings to be in the correct order and https://library2.uniteddiversity.coop/ will be good to go! Thanks!

[nebulon]

I will mark that as solved then, the filelisting is a different issue, hopefully I can rework the surfer UI this week to make that possible and webdav apparently does not support symlinks as such.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

the filelisting is a different issue, hopefully I can rework the surfer UI this week to make that possible

That would be great, good luck

@nebulon said in Does Surfer support symbolic links?:

webdav apparently does not support symlinks as such.

Ah, yes, I'd worked that out, but had forgotten that when I was rsyncing I was doing so to a local folder mounted using webdav. That's obviously why it didn't work.