culhatsker/fileshelter

Simple file storage app made with flask

fileshelter's Issues

Refactor the main module

The app is about to grow bigger, but flask app module will not be able to fit all the changes without damaging readability. We may consider using a Flask feature called blueprints. They allow the programmer to split views into groups by their purpose and then combine them in the main module. This will allow us to meaningfully split the growing app.py into user_views.py and api_views.py.

But first we need to understand how to do it in idiomatic way.
Please start digging some info about "how to build idiomatic flask app" and about blueprints
Here's a wiki page to start: http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/1.0/blueprints

Project lacks automatic tests and CI pipelines

We should add them.

I suggest using pytest for tests and drone for ci.

App lacks context menu for files

You can't delete the file after #15 was merged. Need to add a good way to delete achive a file - a context menu.

I think we should not implement file deletion, because it's not what important files are made for.
We should insted implement file archiving - moving them into special directory.

No current directory label

You only can see the current directory in the browser's url bar. It is not convenient.
Why not add a label that says what the current directory is.

Sort files before displaying

If I add a bunch of files and create a directory, it's lost in betweed all the files in the directory.

We should sort the files by their type (file or directory, not extention) and then by their names.

Can only create directory in a root directory

If i try to create directory inside another one it creates in root directory.

No error handling at all

If I try to access a non-existing directory or file, WSGI debugger shows up and spits out all the app's guts. Need to make prettier errors.

There's a mechanism in Flask that enables one to define custom error handlers for specific HTTP codes or Python exceptions:

http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/1.0/patterns/errorpages/
http://flask.pocoo.org/docs/1.0/api/#flask.Flask.errorhandler

Too much copy-paste code that validates paths

There's alot of copy-paste code that checks if path is valid like that:

fileshelter/fileshelter/app.py

Lines 46 to 47 in 7421de6

	if not absdir.startswith(files_dir):
	raise Exception("Can't access this path")

It can be moved to a function.

Can't upload more that one file at once

Need to implement multiple file upload, it's tedious to upload many files one by one.

Need to add .dockerignore file

Docker pulls .pytest_cache and pycache directories into container and it interfere with the pytest inside the container causing it to fail.

Can we add a .dockerignore file with rules as per documentation that will prevent these directories from appearing in the container?

No readme

There's no readme in this project. How can one figure out how to build and run it?

Why not add feature for backing up all files on remote servers or services?

The app is supposed to keep all files in safety, but how can we achieve this without backing up these files on different/remote storages?

What about implementing an automatic backing up of all uploaded files? App may upload it into some Amazon services like S3 or BackBlaze B2 cloud or we can just secure copy (scp) files to another machine.

Ideally it should be configurable on settings page. Also the progress and status of this process must be visible and controlled by the user. To achieve this, we need to view this backing up process as a list of tasks with statuses etc. A specific page can be created to display the tasks.

The app doesn't encrypt files but it was supposed to

The app was supposed to encrypt/decrypt all uploaded/downloaded files on the go, but now it's just keeping them as is in the directory nearby. Can we fix this?

This code sample may show how we can achieve this:

from Crypto.Hash import SHA256
from Crypto.Cipher import AES
from Crypto import Random

def get_key_for_password(password):
    hashobj = SHA256.new()
    hashobj.update(password)
    return hashobj.digest()

def encode_document(password, data):
    key = get_key_for_password(password)
    iv = Random.new().read(AES.block_size)
    cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_CFB, iv)
    return b'AES' + iv + cipher.encrypt(data)

def decode_document(password, data):
    assert(data.startswith(b'AES'))
    data = data[3:]
    key = get_key_for_password(password)
    iv = data[:AES.block_size]
    cipher = AES.new(key, AES.MODE_CFB, iv)
    return cipher.decrypt(data[AES.block_size:])