link-sharing

Link-sharing is a simple secure temporary file sharing service.

The service meets the following requirements:

• Upload file form returns an HTTP link that can be used to retrieve the file contents.
• The files are stored encrypted
• HTTP links are expired after a day and stop working

To run the application follow the steps:

1. Clone git repo into your local folder: git clone https://github.com/nadios/link-sharing.git

2. Move on to linksharing folder: cd linksharing

3. Install required python libs: pip install -r requirements.txt

4. Setup database by running the migrations: python manage.py migrate

5. The application is running on django test server, so to run it sumply run the command: python manage.py runserver or in case your local port 8000 is already used, try next command changing 8080 to any available port number: python manage.py runserver 8080

6. That is it! Now try http://localhost:8000/upload URL in your browser.

The application manual:

1. To upload a file simply click on Choose file link and browse your directory for any file
2. Click Upload button In case everything went OK, you will see success screen containing the link for an uploaded file and Upload more button.

##TODOs

1. The implementation should be covered with unit tests. I suggest to cover at least 60% of code.
2. Right now we just test the time of file/token expiration and return the file if it's not yet expired. In the future we should apply the mechanism of cleaning the redundant files and tokens from the file system and db. I suggest using some CRON-trigger to accomplish, let's say once a day, the file and token cleaning. We could use Celery for that.
3. We should apply PyLint code quality checking to support python coding standards
4. To add more scalability to the application we could setup web-server to run on multiple workers. So, we will be able to perform multiple requests at once
5. We should decide what is best option for the data storage, whether it would stay PostgreSQL, or maybe try noSQL solution like MongoDB
6. The better logging of errors and error pages should be provided. So we should inform user each time when some technical problems occured and the file could not be uploaded or accessed
7. The better UX-design should also be designed and implemented, it should be responsive and maybe we should use (Bootstrap)[http://getbootstrap.com/] to handle the look and responsiveness

##Improvements

1. We should pay more attention to app security, possibly we should transfer it onto HTTPS, which could be done once it is transferred from django test server
2. Also we should limit the file types that user could store, the system could be less vulnarable if we forbid uploading javascript files which could basically be executed and the user info could be stolen
3. We should add user membership functionality. So user could be able to register and manage the uploaded files
4. Allow user to upload multiple files at once and show the progress bar of file uploading