Share files with everyone on the local area network!
Spawn an HTTP server in a directory and let everyone access its contents via a browser!
Customize the UI by modifying the frontend code!
Basically, this is an extended version of python3 -m http.server.
Run make on *nix machines. This command produces the share executable file that can be launched.
After compilation, you can launch the program by running ./share localhost 8080. Notice that if you open any browser of your choice and navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080, you will see the contents of the directory. Click on the file names to open or download them, and click on directories to navigate into them. Notice that clicking .. brings you one directory up the filesystem tree.
To use the program in any directory of your choice, first modify the PATH_TO_TEMPLATE_DIR macro to be the full path to the static directory on your machine, e.g., /home/user/lan_file_share/static. Then, recompile the executable using make. Finally, place the executable into your PATH. If you want the executable to be in the /usr/local/bin directory, you can run sudo mv share /usr/local/bin.
Now, go to any directory of your choice and run share npa 8080. Here, npa stands for "no particular address," which evaluates to 0.0.0.0, meaning that the HTTP server will be accessible on all local area networks your machine is connected to. If you want to specify a certain LAN, run share <ip> <port>, where <ip> is the address of your machine in that particular LAN.
Others can access the files by navigating to http://<ip>:<port>.
Let's take a closer look at the static/template.html file. There are some special placeholders there. #TITLE will be replaced with LISTING of {path}, and #LISTING will be replaced with the links to different files and directories. PATH_TO_TEMPLATE_DIR is a special value used to hide the full path to the static directory, which may contain sensitive information that you might not want to share.
The static directory also contains a .js and a .css file. While they do not significantly enhance the UI, they serve as examples of how to add more files and import them into the HTML template to improve the frontend.