QTip

QTip is a self-hosted text hosting platform that is managed via command-line. A text hosting platform is a service that serves simple text-based content similarly to a blog. The difference between a blog and a text hosting platform is text hosting services are usually meant for infrequently inserted evergreen content.

Some examples of pages that could exist on a text hosting platform:

• Recipes for food
• Lists of favorite software
• Code snippets that are used as reference

QTip provides you the ability to quickly host any text file (with markdown support!) with one line of code.

The line below will serve fried-chicken-recipe.md on yourdomain.com/recipe/fried-chicken

qtip serve /recipe/fried-chicken fried-chicken-recipe.md

Features

• Markdown file support
• Automatically uploads and stores local images embedded in markdown to your preferred CDN
• 100% self-hosted 🚀

Demo

There is a demo of this service here: https://www.useqtip.com/

How it works

The Gist

As of version 0.1.0 QTip takes the contents of a text/markdown/json file and stores it as a attribute of a document in mongodb. The datastructure looks as follows:

{
    path: string[]; // the deconstructed url path split into an array by "/"
    content: string;
    title: string; // auto-generated from the first line of the file
    public: boolean;
    restrictions?: { ipList: string[] } // optional
}

When a user visits a url on the qtip server, the qtip server will match the url to a path if it exists and returns the content stored in the string.

File-as-Folder System

Let's say a user saves a file under the path /recipies and then another file under the name /recipies/chicken. QTip will show a small display on the /recipies page that indicates there are "children" to the path provided. See this page as an example.

Installation

Server

Via Heroku

To deploy this service to heroku, follow these instructions:

1. Click the button below and follow the instructions on Heroku's website

2. Clone the repository locally

heroku git:clone -a name-of-your-qtip-heroku-project cd name-of-your-qtip-heroku-project git remote add origin https://github.com/4shub/qtip git pull origin master ```

Self Hosted

The instructions for self-hosted docs are located here

Modifying qtip's config

Visit your qtip instance and do the following:

cp qtip-config.default.json qtip-config.json

Edit the qtip-config.json

Client

To run the client make sure you have the following installed:

• Python 3.7 or higher

1. Install

   pip install qtip-client-cli 
   

2. Set your environment variables

   export QTIP_AUTH_TOKEN=the-auth-token-used-to-validate-your-service
   export QTIP_SERVER=http://your-qtip-server-location.com
   

3. Go!

   qtip help
   

Usage

Serving a file

To use qtip to serve a file, follow these instructions:

1. Navigate or create a file you would like uploaded, and run the following command

   qtip serve /path/to/serve filename
   

2. Files are hidden initially, you can make a file public to the internet by doing the following

   qtip public /path/to/serve 
   

   Note: files cannot be made private once they go public

   Sometimes you don't want a file to be public to everyone. You can instead restrict a file to particular ips by doing the following:

   qtip restrictip /path/to/serve 192.0.0.1,145.554.432.33
   

   Please list ips you want to restrict delineated by a comma Note: You can only restrict private files

Deleting a file

To delete a file, do the following:

qtip delete /path/to/serve

Previews

To preview your document while editing it:

qtip preview /path/to/serve filename

You can preview it with your live site by doing the following as well

qtip preview /path/to/serve filename --live

Other Commands

• qtip ls /path - lists all files within a particular serve route
• qtip cat /path/to/file - displays the file content in terminal
• qtip get /path/to/file output_file_name.txt - downloads file content to a specific file name

Contributing

This project is in active development and would love some helping hands.

WIP

This readme is a work in progress!