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Ever since the dawn of time (okay, a year or two) I've been searching for a tool that I can use to quickly share my files easily and conveniently. BitTorrent doesn't suit the job, it's not quick at all. FTP works, but the catch is that users need an FTP client. There may be one built into most browsers but that just isn't convenient for most people (including myself) and it does not give you customisability with regard to what it looks like on the client's end. Basically it depends entirely on what the user's browser or FTP client is like.

I've tried web servers. I found Apache does the job best, but it's still not a file server. I wanted something designed for serving files, not websites. I don't need something that has support for PHP or fancy mod_rewrite-style URLs, subdomains and so on. I set up Apache such that I moved or copied files inside the root directory and that was the directory that appeared when users browsed my web server. But Apache is big and bulky. It's not designed for something that simple, and it definitely wasn't good enough.

I tried smaller, more lightweight webservers such as thttpd and a few others. I almost found one which was perfect for my needs: it was a single file, commandline, and would simply serve a directory set in a .conf file. The problem was that it didn't do automatic listings of the directory contents. Since creating HTML files containing urls to the files I wanted to share would have been far too much work, it wasn't suitable.

I continued to use Apache when I needed to and continued to be unhappy with it. Until today.

HFS: HTTP File Server

Someone in uTorrent's IRC channel (#utorrent p2p-irc) pasted the link to HFS (HTTP File Server) and I checked it out. Single executable (600KB), specifically designed for file serving, and seemed to have all the features I needed. I tried it. This has existed for 4 years and I'm only discovering it now?!

1. It uses a VFS (virtual file system) preventing me from having to copy or move files into the root directory. I can set up 'real' or 'virtual' folders, and so on, allowing me to set permissions on them or hide them from certain users etc.
2. Amazingly detailed logs. No more sifting through Apache's pathetic logfile, now I can see everything (connections, requests, downloads, uploads, disconnects, etc) in real-time including lists of files currently being downloaded.
3. Full customisation of... well, everything. The HTML templates, the mime types, the filetypes that the browser will download or display, limits, users, bans, ... all of it. I haven't found something yet that I can't customise in some form or another.

The only bad thing is that it's coded in Delphi (kidding, don't kill me lopardo).