NOTE
The service is now invite-only. Please send an email at hello@chunk.io if you’d like to get access to the service.

Upload files from your terminal

  $ curl -u user:pass -T path/to/file https://chunk.io
  https://chunk.io/crohr/f1ec04b3586f415d9ae4cac7bbe64826

Tired of having to open a web browser to upload some files and make them available to people on the Web? Don’t want to remember a complicated API to do it on the command line? chunk.io is designed to be the simplest way to upload a file from the command line.

If your system does not have cURL, go install it right now.

Yet another file upload tool?

Every web site that allows you to upload files either requires you to open a web browser, and/or provides an API that’s just too complicated to be usable from the command-line. chunk.io solves this, and more:

Upload any kind of file, not just text files, up to 200MB.
Do it with your command-line tool of choice; that may not look like much at first, but this is much more convenient when you’re spending your time in a terminal. No context-switching, and faster. Plus you get all the benefits of UNIX pipes.
Syntax highlight uploaded source files by appending a language extension to the file URI.

And, your files are securely stored on Amazon S3.

Command-line usage

Transfer a single file from your filesystem

Here is what you type in your command line:

$ curl -u user:pass -T path/to/file https://chunk.io

Here is what you receive (as a text/uri-list payload):

https://chunk.io/crohr/f1ec04b3586f415d9ae4cac7bbe64826

Simple heh? From now on we’ll no longer separate request and response, and the username & password will be stored in the local .netrc file, i.e. the previous example will be written as:

$ curl -n -T path/to/file https://chunk.io
https://chunk.io/crohr/f1ec04b3586f415d9ae4cac7bbe64826

To silence the progression bar automatically added by cURL, just add the -s flag:

$ curl -nsT path/to/file https://chunk.io
https://chunk.io/crohr/f1ec04b3586f415d9ae4cac7bbe64826

Upload multiple files from your filesystem

$ curl -nsT "{path/to/file1,path/to/file2}" https://chunk.io
https://chunk.io/f/1edae590c82d46deb930b4237828d809
https://chunk.io/f/6f564528446f1572482f8462cf544d05

One URL per line. No worries. You can even do:

$ curl -nsT "img[1-1000].png" https://chunk.io
https://chunk.io/f/1edae590c82d46deb930b4237828d809
https://chunk.io/f/6f564528446f1572482f8462cf544d05
...

We also accept multipart uploads. In this case, if you send multiple files at once, they’ll be tar’ed up in a single .tar file! Here is how you would share multiple photos with your friends:

$ curl -n -FILE1=@path/to/file1.jpg -FILE2=@path/to/file2.jpg https://chunk.io
https://chunk.io/f/xxx

Then, you can either share the URL to the tar file, or access a single file within the archive:

$ curl https://chunk.io/f/xxx/file1.jpg

Pipe some content into chunk.io

$ cat file1 file2 | curl -nsT - https://chunk.io
https://chunk.io/f/1edae590c82d46deb930b4237828d809

Basically you can use this to upload the output of any tool that outputs something on STDOUT.

Yes, that means cURL as well:

$ curl http://www.iana.org/domains/example/ | curl -nsT - https://chunk.io
https://chunk.io/f/005310aba7fd6d1ef3ff0223ca166b9c

Delete files

Since Chunk.io now requires authentication, you can also remove any uploaded file:

$ curl -n -X DELETE https://chunk.io/crohr/f1ec04b3586f415d9ae4cac7bbe64826

Clipboard integration

If you’re on Mac OS, here’s how you send the content of your clipboard:

$ pbpaste | curl -nsT - chunk.io
https://chunk.io/f/1bb394a6596eb3a7b53ae2760c646b0d

And here’s how you copy the resulting link into your clipboard:

$ curl -nsT path/to/file https://chunk.io | pbcopy
$ pbpaste
https://chunk.io/f/1bb394a6596eb3a7b53ae2760c646b0d

See this article for an equivalent tool for Linux.

List uploaded files

$ curl -ns https://chunk.io/USERNAME
# last_modified=2017-08-16T14:07:15.000Z size=8296034
https://chunk.io/crohr/1a47cbda7c2d4f5cadbf5d2d0e65f1c3
# last_modified=2017-08-19T14:18:00.000Z size=395
https://chunk.io/crohr/3701eec6fd1b410c8ea1f77ec7115f36
...

Tips

Pass the -s flag to get silent output (no progression bar).
Pass the -i flag to see the HTTP header of the response.
Pass the -n flag to automatically send authentication credentials from your .netrc file. E.g.

# ~/.netrc
machine chunk.io
  login USERNAME
  password PASSWORD

Look up the cURL manual to see the other options available.

Security

Chunk.io is only available over SSL: https://chunk.io.

Be awesome

Syntax highlighting

Add the lang query parameter at the end of the URL to syntax highlight the file. For instance for a nodejs source file:

Go from this: https://chunk.io/crohr/45c179c7541c47cc922080f933b05857
To this: https://chunk.io/crohr/45c179c7541c47cc922080f933b05857.js

For image files, just set the extension to png, jpg, etc. to get the image displayed in a proper HTML page: https://chunk.io/crohr/f1ec04b3586f415d9ae4cac7bbe64826.jpg.

Tar archive preview

Remember the multi-file to .tar example? You can easily navigate within any uploaded tar archived by appending the path of the directory you want to view (here the root path: /).

E.g. https://chunk.io/crohr/d53e0f60109145f9b97accb5c3c9c0b0/.

Single file extraction from tar archive

Just append the name of the file you’d like to extract from the archive.

E.g. https://chunk.io/crohr/d53e0f60109145f9b97accb5c3c9c0b0/index.html.

Poor man’s static website hosting

See above: tar your static assets, upload to chunk, and access the index.html file!

Is it free?

Yes, but due to abuse you need to manually ask for access. Uploads are limited to 200MB, and may be deleted after 6 months.

Want your own?

This is a simple NodeJS daemon, packaged as a DEB/RPM package or Docker image that can be easily installed on your servers. Contact hello@chunk.io if you’d like to buy a copy.

Author

Made by Cyril Rohr - Humming along since 2010.

Check out my other projects: