lifter-1.3.0 is not a library.

Lift

A simple CLI-tool to share data quickly, without needing to trust external servers with your data.

The only outside connection made is to bore.pub, which provides a tunnel to your machine, so that you don't have to keep any ports permanently open. Neither bore nor any other server will ever have a copy of your data.

Only the sender needs to install lift - the receiver can access it from a normal URL, directly in their web browser.

Showcase

We simply lift an image we want to share...

pass the URL to our friend, who will type it into their browser or fetch it...

and can then see the cute image we sent them!

(Credits for the cat go to <cataas.com>)

I personally use lift whenever I would've previously used limewire or similar services, because now the data always stays on my own device, and I don't have to trust any external server provider with it.

Installation

If you have cargo already installed, just run cargo install lifter. Sadly, lift was already taken as a crate name on crates.io.

Otherwise, either build it yourself, or get one of the pre-built binaries.

Usage

Usage: lift [OPTIONS] [FILENAME]

The available options are:

-f - file mode
-c, --count <MAX_COUNT> - how often the link may be accessed before it expires [default: 1]
-t, --time <TIMEOUT> - the time in seconds after which the link expires [default: 0 / never]
-r, --remote <REMOTE> - the bore remote to use [default: "bore.pub"]

By default, lift reads from standard input. This means you can run it without any parameters like so:

$ lift
Hello world!
Pressing Enter inserts a newline.
End your message by pressing Ctrl+D.

This means you can also pipe into lift:

$ echo 'Hello world!' | lift
$ cat message.txt | lift

and so on. Piping files is not supported; please use lift -f <filename> instead.

When a filename is specified, lift will use the contents of that file instead. This means, that cat message.txt | lift is equivalent to lift message.txt.

If you want to send an actual file, instead of just its contents, you can use the [-f]ile flag. For example, lift -f cat.png will send the image as such, and not just as text consisting of meaningless bytes. More technically, this sets content-type to application/octet-stream instead of text/html.

You will then receive your randomised one-time access link:

$ lift message.txt 
Data available at http://bore.pub:12345/a1b2c3d4

Opening it in your browser (or requesting the data using tools such as wget) reveals your data. When -f was used, the file will be downloaded (or displayed by the default file handler) instead of rendered as text in your browser.

lift will terminate and the link will become useless after the file has been accessed MAX_COUNT times, or the TIMEOUT has elapsed.

A full example:

$ lift -c 2 -t 120 -r "bore.pub" -f panda.png

This will host panda.png as a downloadable file, which can be downloaded a maximum of two times and will expire after 2 minutes (120 seconds). The bore tunnel will be the "bore.pub" server.

Bore

The only thing bore does is bypass your firewall to open up a port on your machine, so it can be accessed remotely.

If you wanted to do manually what lift does for you, you would run bore local <PORT> --to bore.pub, and then start a webserver on port <PORT>. The command will give you a URL, e.g. bore.pub:8993, which will then route all incoming traffic to <your machine>:<PORT>. lift additionally sets up the timeout and access counting for you - so you can make sure scrapers have no time to find your data.

Build

lift is written in Rust 1.94.1, although the MSRV (minimum supported rust version) is likely way lower. It depends on the axum, tokio, tokio-util, rand, bore-cli, clap, futures-util and async-stream crates. You need to have Rust installed on your system in order to build lift.

To build lift yourself, clone this repository, then run cargo build --release. Your resulting binary will be located at target/release/lift.