Cubby - Open Source File Sharing

@girish Went ahead and added some requests. Are you and @nebulon open to contributions?

I am definitely quite invested in this so sorry for the insane number of issues! I'm sure some of these are things you already had in mind but I figured it might as well be tracked.

nebulon

@atrilahiji no worries this is great, a lot of things are in vague states or not yet fully wired up in the UI. But with the issues I can work through them one by one.

@nebulon Hahaha perfect. Since its fairly early in the development of this app, I might try to take a look and see if I don't get overwhelmed trying to contribute and knock some of those off too. Thankfully I mostly work with Vue

girish

@atrilahiji Yes, of course, contributions welcome. That's why it's opensource. Feel free to open PRs as well! Currently, lots of basic docs like install instructions etc is lacking, but it will come

Until 5 years ago, Cubby was the name of a proprietary LogMeIn app with a similar purpose. Hopefully, you guys won't have problems with IP rights.

https://alternativeto.net/software/cubby/about/

girish

@hillside502 Oh, thanks for pointing that out! Something to keep in mind before we launch this for reals.

Name suggestion: "Fileron"

My hope for this is to eventually replace Nextcloud for file storage. And move to Cubby for files, SoGO for email/cal/contacts, and so on. Moving away from one app that does everything kind of ok to multiple good specialized apps.

scooke

Today I went to install Cubby. As I scrolled down to its place in the App Store I coudn't help but compare everyone else's logos/icons with the plain file folder icon of Cubby. You probably are planning to create a more stand-out logo/icon for it, so here is a suggestion:

Rather than creating a derivative of YAFF (yet another file folder), take the existing Cloudron logo and turn that into a file folder-looking image. I suppose with the angles it might end up looking more like a partially open door, if it stays vertical. You'd have to tilt it forward somewhat in order to get the darker background "folder" effect.

And further along those lines, if you have more custom made Cloudron apps, each could be a variation of the main Cloudron icon.

Just some thoughts. Congratulations.

girish

@scooke yes, the folder icon is really just a place holder logo. We need to find some time to make some real logo.

ruihildt

That's great!

I'll try this out, I share your frustrations with regard to the current solutions.

For me the most important part is the sync aspect from mobile/desktop. I want to have a straightforward and firstclass experience sharing files between my devices.

Do you have in mind what the future workflow will be like in that regard?

robi

The About menu once logged in needs some love..

mehdi

@ruihildt From what I understood of the post, the idea is to use existing WebDAV sync clients. So there should already be good ones for all platforms.

nebulon

@robi ha, yes lots of placeholder content still.

For anyone interested in the collabora integration, if you install collabora on the same Cloudron and then edit the config.json for cubby like the following with your collabora domain, it can already open ods and odt files:

{
    "collabora": {
        "host": "https://office.example.com"
    }
}

ruihildt

@mehdi Do you have any good recommandations in mind?

mehdi

@ruihildt On the Linux side, I believe Gnome and KDE both have native support for mounting webdav, not syncing to a local folder though. Not sure on other OSs.

robi

@nebulon said in Cubby - Open Source File Sharing:

@robi ha, yes lots of placeholder content still.

For anyone interested in the collabora integration, if you install collabora on the same Cloudron and then edit the config.json for cubby like the following with your collabora domain, it can already open ods and odt files:
{
    "collabora": {
        "host": "https://office.example.com"
    }
}

Does this not work with OnlyOffice?

MooCloud_Matt

Maybe storage already on S3, it's easier to maintain and it's scalable, redundant, easy to have a remote backend for storage.

A good fit for the new multiserver cloudron.

girish

@moocloud_matt maybe you can open feature request on github

robi

@girish instead of doing just an app integration, I think making it a general Cloudron integration would be better, and cover a lot more apps.
Mount S3 and store certain directories of Apps there.

girish

@robi I guess you mean something like a s3fs or fuse mount? From whag I have heard, they are not very stable. And also, they don't support file permissions and meta data afaik .

neurokrish

@nebulon @girish will there be a search option for files? It will be nice to have an indexing mechanism for files that are already ocr'd, instead of just looking for the file names.

robi

@girish No, I mean more like rclone

MooCloud_Matt

@girish
I will,
I just think that standard storage backend will make also your job easier to maintain it in the future.

nebulon

@robi said in Cubby - Open Source File Sharing:

@nebulon said in Cubby - Open Source File Sharing:
@robi ha, yes lots of placeholder content still.

For anyone interested in the collabora integration, if you install collabora on the same Cloudron and then edit the config.json for cubby like the following with your collabora domain, it can already open ods and odt files:
{
    "collabora": {
        "host": "https://office.example.com"
    }
}
Does this not work with OnlyOffice?

OnlyOffice uses a different kind of API and iframe integration, which is currently not implemented. I've created a feature request for this at https://github.com/cloudron-io/cubby/issues/18

yusf

Good news, a highly anticipated development! With a shared storage with the Syncthing app I suppose the apps may work in conjunction?

Just tried the latest release and I love it! I think I'd be ready to use it once I can do the following:

Sync via webdav
Manage users
Configure storage limit per-user
Use OnlyOffice

Right now I use NextCloud for email + calendar + files + contacts. I'd like to move the first three to Sogo and use Cubby as a dedicated file storage app for clients. It looks promising! Keep up the excellent work!

nebulon

@atridad usermanagement is probably out-of-scope for some time, since on Cloudron this would be done in the Cloudron dashboard. There is a small cli tool already though for local non-LDAP users.

If you have any specific feature requests around that, might be good to open a github issue to track those.

marcusquinn

Just seen this, nice work! @nebulon & @girish I can see the need, potential and definitely happy to help with testing and feedback.

The Apps I do find handy in Nextcloud, that I think are fair-game to be features for Cubby, without being feature-creep, are the Photos Explorer and Map Explorer for Photos. Our users really like both of those in Nextcloud, although wish they were a bit faster of course!

Mountain Duck pretty-much does everything the Nextcloud sync app does for those looking at alternatives there, although at a cost.

I'd like to see a Compact view, similar to Google Drive. These over-sized, over-spaced UIs do seem to infantalise things to me, when anything used in anger really needs to make better use of screen space when most users are on smaller screens.

girish

@marcusquinn yeah, the first goal currently is to get the file sharing aspect work well (and syncing either via nextcloud client or other webdav clients).

Photos has to explored in the future whether this is to be a totally separate app or part of cubby.

marcusquinn

GitHub issues logged.

Perhaps some inspiration for a Compact view:

humptydumpty

Is Cubby reliable enough to have some basic cloud storage?

marcusquinn

If you wanted to really make for a killer feature, I guess you could mount existing Nextcloud file systems in Cubby, so one could use either interface and migrate as Cubby matured and made Nextcloud redundant for those not wanting all the plugins.

jdaviescoates

@marcusquinn said in Cubby - Open Source File Sharing:

Photos Explorer and Map Explorer for Photos. Our users really like both of those in Nextcloud, although wish they were a bit faster of course!

I'm hopeful we'll get PhotoPrism one day soon which I think does that stuff too (and likely much faster than Nextcloud)

3246

Thank you to everyone involved with creating and maintaining Cubby! It looks and works really well for me, especially considering it's still in beta.

Please, can somebody clue me in on how to use volumes with it? I tried mounting something but there's no way to switch the path to the volume as far as I can make out.

nebulon

@3246 thanks for trying Cubby, as you realized, it is still only some alpha basically and has no support for volumes yet. But it will get support for volumes. Most likely though not in the same way other apps have, but more like a volume is its own storage, to be able to have multiple data volumes for different purposes.

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Cubby - Open Source File Sharing