Home Easily Share Files From Your Local Computer Over the Internet with Showoff or PageKite

Easily Share Files From Your Local Computer Over the Internet with Showoff or PageKite

Showoff is a simple service that lets you use your local computer as a file server over the Internet. You install the software (a Ruby gem), specify a folder or file using the “Share” command and then get a URL for sharing the location – ie, https://you.showoff.io. It’s only available for Unix-based operating systems like OSX and Linux. There is now Windows version, but it might be possible to get it working with Cygwin. Update: Showoff requires a work Web server already be running.

PageKite offers a similar service (this one based on Python), and has open-sourced its code. It is available for Windows, OSX and Linux.

From the Showoff website, here are a few possible uses:

  • Share your showoff url for a locally run dev server to get some quick feedback from clients or other developers
  • Test your locally run dev server with a real SSL certificate (great for pesky IE SSL bugs)
  • Develop and test against APIs that require callback URLs accesible on the public Internet.
  • Develop and test mobile applications against locally run servers.

Showoff charges $1 a day, or $5 a month for unlimited use. PageKite is free for up to 1GB of transfer, and costs $1.50 per GB after that, with discounts for purchasing larger amounts of bandwidth. Update: PageKite lead developer Bjarni Rúnar Einarsson comments that the free quota is 2.5GB, not 1GB.

This thread on Hacker News has a few comments explaining how to set something like this up yourself for free.

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