netgiv is a single binary client and server to facilitate sending files across
your local network quickly and easily.
It uses a familiar unix pipeline paradigm, so files can be moved between machines as part of a pipeline, obviating the need for dealing with temporary files.
netgiv automatically detects "copy" (stdin is a pipe) or "paste" (stdout is a
pipe) modes, allowing intuitive use like:
hostA$ pg_dumpall | netgiv
hostB$ netgiv | psql restoredb
Note that since netgiv uses a persistent server, there is no need to setup both ends of the pipeline in advance (compared to netcat or similar tools).
All data is encrypted in flight (though not in the temporary files on the server) Access to the server is granted by an authentication token (preshared key) of your choice.
Grab the appropriate version from https://github.com/tardisx/netgiv/releases, unzip and place the binary somewhere on your $PATH.
Copy and paste for the trusting & lazy:
curl -L https://github.com/tardisx/netgiv/releases/download/v0.0.4/netgiv-linux-v0.0.4.zip | funzip > netgiv && chmod a+x netgiv
go install github.com/tardisx/netgiv@latest
netgiv should end up on your go binary path.
Clone this repository, run go build.
Configuration of netgiv is via a YAML configuration file in
$HOME/.netgiv/config.yaml.
Run netgiv --help-config to see a sample config file.
The server requires the 'authtoken' and 'port' configuration keys to be set.
The client requires the 'authtoken', 'port' and 'address' configuration keys to be set.
authtoken- this is any arbitrary string, you should choose something not easy to guessport- this is the TCP port the server will listen on (and that the client will connect to)address- the IP address or hostname of thenetgivserver
To run a server, just run:
netgiv --server
netgiv will run in the foreground and log accesses to it.
On any client, run:
$ echo "Hello" | netgiv
To check for success, try:
$ netgiv | cat
You should see "hello" echoed on your terminal.
To check the list of files on the server:
$ netgiv -l
1: UTF-8 text (6 B)
2: application/x-mach-binary (6.5 MB)
3: video/quicktime (14 MB)
4: image/png (1.5 MB)
Note that netgiv tries to identify each file based on file magic heuristics.
If you would like to fetch (paste) a particular file:
netgiv -p 3 > file.mov
Where '3' comes from the information provided in the -l output.
Note that providing no -p option is the same as -p X where X is the highest
numbered upload (most recent).
Since netgiv is designed to be used in a pipeline, it does not provide any output on successful execution (apart from your actual data on stdout of course!)
If you'd like to see debugging information, use the --debug flag.
Note that netgiv will send error logs to stderr in cases of problems.
It's possible that you do not trust the hosts you are running the netgiv client on,
or otherwise not want to store your authtoken in a file on there. If that is the case
there are a couple of alternate options:
The environment variable NETGIV_AUTHTOKEN can be used to provide the authtoken. A
common way to leverage this is to send it when you ssh to a remote host via the
SendEnv option (see your ssh_config man page).
If the authtoken has not been set by any of the above methods, it will be prompted for interactively (it will not be echoed to the screen). Note that this only applies to the client - the server must have a config file with an authtoken specified.
The netgiv server will store files in your normal system temporary dir. They will
be deleted when the server shuts down (SIGTERM). These files are not encrypted.
Windows support is marginal, at best, mostly because of the lack of POSIX style pipes. Bug reports and suggestions for workarounds are welcome.
- thanks to tengig for the name