The Null Pointer

This is a no-bullshit file hosting and URL shortening service that also runs 0x0.st. Use with uWSGI.

Configuration

To configure 0x0, create instance/config.py. The defaults are at the start of fhost.py. To change them, add them to instance/config.py— for example:

SQLALCHEMY_DATABASE_URI = "sqlite:///some/path/db.sqlite"

For more information on instance configuration, see the Flask documentation.

To customize the home and error pages, simply create a templates directory in your instance directory and copy any templates you want to modify there.

If you are running nginx, you should use the X-Accel-Redirect header. To make it work, include this in your nginx config’s server block:

location /up {
    internal;
}

where /up is whatever you’ve configured as FHOST_STORAGE_PATH.

For all other servers, set FHOST_USE_X_ACCEL_REDIRECT to False and USE_X_SENDFILE to True, assuming your server supports this. Otherwise, Flask will serve the file with chunked encoding, which has several downsides, one of them being that range requests will not work. This is a problem for example when streaming media files: It won’t be possible to seek, and some ISOBMFF (MP4) files will not play at all.

To make files expire, simply create a cronjob that runs cleanup.py every now and then.

Before running the service for the first time, run FLASK_APP=fhost flask db upgrade.

NSFW Detection

0x0 supports classification of NSFW content via Yahoo’s open_nsfw Caffe neural network model. This works for images and video files and requires the following:

• Caffe Python module (built for Python 3)
• ffmpegthumbnailer executable in $PATH

Network Security Considerations

Keep in mind that 0x0 can fetch files from URLs. This includes your local network! You should take precautions so that this feature cannot be abused. 0x0 does not (yet) have a way to filter remote URLs, but on Linux, you can use firewall rules and/or namespaces. This is less error-prone anyway.

For instance, if you are using the excellent FireHOL, it’s very easy to create a group on your system and use it as a condition in your firewall rules. You would then run the application server under that group.