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Ad Hoc Filesharing Made Easy with Sharing and Flox

Ross Turk | 7 February 2025

One of my common workflows contains a particularly annoying task. It needs to be done right at the end of the process for producing artwork - just like the ladder leaning on the fence you see above!

This process involves shelling into a remote server, one with CUDA cores, and generating an image using our AI modeling environment. Once the image has been generated, the tedious part begins. I have to get my image from the remote server to my laptop, where I'm preparing the pull request.

It's not a big deal. It's not hard, it's just an obnoxious schlep at the end of a creative experience. This used to mean I would fumble through these steps:

• opening a new shell term or tab
• scp-ing the file from the remote server to my local system
• opening the image to view it in full size

I no longer do any of this because of a simple package called sharing.

Sharing is caring

The sharing package is designed to make it easy to spin up a web server with the contents of your current directory.

To get it, run flox install sharing in your favorite environment. I have it in my default environment, but you might prefer it as part of a discrete toolset. The best part: this doesn't affect your current Node setup at all - in fact, you don't even need to have Node installed. Flox takes care of it all behind the scenes and gives you the tool you asked for.

Once it is installed, just run sharing along with a path, often . for the current directory.

It provides you with a URL you can visit to browse its contents, and it even gives you a QR code so you can view them from your phone.

I can view my remote files, download the ones I want, and get on with my day. If I find that it's binding to the wrong network interface, I can give it a hint with --ip - e.g., --ip 100.92.14.35.

Sharing as a one-liner

Don't want to install sharing into your environment permanently? Just want to use it once without affecting your current project or its dev stack?

Try the Flox sharing environment, which can be run as a one-liner:

% flox activate -r flox/sharing -- sharing .

This will activate the flox/sharing environment and run sharing in the current directory. When you're done, you can key in a spry ^C and be restored to your previous shell environment.

Flox makes work feel like play

Using any of the 150,000 packages in the Flox Catalog is as easy as a flox install command, and they can be installed into environments that are hackable, stackable, and shareable. It's the best way to get new stuff, and you can download it right here at flox.dev.