Airlift is a self-hosted file upload and sharing service

Hazem Abbas

Jul 25, 2024 — 1 min read

Airlift is a self-hosted file upload and sharing service. The clients upload files to the server and return a nice link for you to share. Just bring your own server and domain.

airliftd is the Airlift server. You drop the server on any dedicated, VPS, shared host, whatever, as long as it supports running a binary and gives you access to ports or frontend server reverse proxying.

A client sends files to it and recieves nice URLs to share. The server itself also provides a web-based client to upload files from, as well as manage existing uploads and customize some behaviors.

Airlift is written using Golang, and it has been around for years. It gets regular updates and bug fixes.

Clients

Web client
Cross-platform CLI
macOS Client

Lift CLI

lift is a CLI client interface to airliftd. It takes a filename as an argument and uploads the server at the configured host, which is stored as a JSON file in an OS-dependent location (~/.airlift on POSIX, %LOCALAPPDATA%\airlift\airlift_config on Windows). These may also be configured by the client.

If the server requires a password, the client will prompt for it and it will be saved in a secure system-dependent fashion: