ExBin

A pastebin clone written in Phoenix/Elixir. Live here.

I work on this project from time to time, so the development pace is slow. If you want to dive in, feel free. The codebase is relatively small because, well, it's a simple application.

Features

• Post pastes either publicly or privately
• Opt-in ephemeral snippets. By default these are deleted approximately 60 minutes after creation.
• Views are only incremented once every 24 hours, per client.
• Usage statistics.
• List of all public pastes
• Use nc to pipe text and get back the URL. (e.g., cat file.txt | nc exbin.call-cc.be 9999)
• "Raw View" where text is presented as is. Well suited for copy/pasting.
• "Reader View" where text is presented in a more readable manner. Well suited to share prose text.
• "Code View", showing snippets with syntax highlighting.

Installation

The easiest way to run your own instance of ExBin is by running it in a Docker container.

Environment var	Description	Default
SECRET_KEY_BASE	Secret hash to encrypt traffic. Generate with mix phx.gen.secret.	Required
SECRET_SALT	Secret hash to encrypt traffic. Generate with mix phx.gen.secret.	Required
DATABASE_HOST	Host for database.	Required
DATABASE_DB	Name of the database.	Required
DATABASE_USER	Username for Postgres instance.	Required
DATABASE_PASSWORD	Password for Postgres user.	Required
POOL_SIZE	Concurrent database connections.	10
TZ	TZ database name	Required
EPHEMERAL_AGE	Ephemeral age of snippets in minutes.	60
HTTP_PORT	Port for HTTP endpoint.	4000
TCP_PORT	Port for the TCP endpoint.	Required
TCP_HOST	IP to bind on for TCP socket.	Required
MAX_SIZE	Maximum size in bytes for the TCP endpoint.	Required
DEFAULT_VIEW	Standard view for snippets. (Supported values are 'code', 'reader', or 'raw')	Required
BASE_URL	Base URL for this instance. Necessary behind a reverse proxy. E.g., https://example.com.	Required
HOST	Hostname for this instance. E.g., example.com.	Required
API_KEY	Password token for the API. If not set, the API is publicly available.	Optional
BRAND	Name of the ExBin instance. Shown in bottom right corner when creating a snippet.	ExBin
CUSTOM_LOGO_PATH	The full path on the host machine to your custom logo. E.g. "/srv/exbin/my_logo.png"	Optional
CUSTOM_LOGO_SIZE	The pixel dimensions of your logo, which is assumed to be square. Ignored if no logo set.	30

Create an .env file and give a value to all these environment variables. You can leave the ones with default values as is, if you want. An example is shown below.

SECRET_KEY_BASE=TUvAjMKpIXf+ik05cgmjErbtWVUBmKX70TCtg9ToU3ZC8gdNQoYnCrLAljBuHvKU 
SECRET_SALT=Qrw8mzDAAdvouNi6EvP/vEBwgPw0lCXh2dCANXKbW0HnQElvhB8nETC/q/L+zxxa 
DATABASE_HOST=db 
DATABASE_DB=exbin
DATABASE_USER=postgres
DATABASE_PASSWORD=postgres 
POOL_SIZE=10 
TZ=Europe/Brussels 
EPHEMERAL_AGE=60
HTTP_PORT=5000
TCP_PORT=9999
TCP_HOST=0.0.0.0
MAX_SIZE=2048
DEFAULT_VIEW=code 
BASE_URL=https://example.com
HOST=example.com 
DATABASE_DATA=/tmp/exbindata
API_KEY=mysupersecretkey
BRAND=ExBin
CUSTOM_LOGO_PATH=/exbin_branding/my_cool_logo.png
CUSTOM_LOGO_SIZE=50

Copy the docker-compose.yaml file, and change accordingly. Finally, run it with docker-compose up.

Custom Branding in Docker

In order to configure this you will need to mount the file into your docker container as a volume, and then set the CUSTOM_LOGO_PATH environment variable to the full path (inside the container) that the file is mounted at.
Here is an example of what you would add to your docker-compose.yml:

services:
  exbin:
    environment:
      CUSTOM_LOGO_PATH=/exbin_branding/my_cool_logo.png
      CUSTOM_LOGO_SIZE=50
    volumes:
      - /path/on/docker/host/my_logo.png:/exbin_branding/logo.png

Logo by default is 30x30 pixels, but you can define the size for the width/height attributes of the img tag by setting CUSTOM_LOGO_SIZE.
Logos are assumed to be square, so the same value will be used for both height and width.
Any layout errors that come from using sizes other than 30x30 are your problem. :-)

Things To Do

• Empty snippets are not allowed, but if you use some unprintable chars it still passes.
• Synced paged back or not?
• Rate limit the amount of pastes a user can make.
• Admin page
• Nicer warnings/checks on environment variables instead of crashing immediately.
• Check older issues to see what I missed
• Allow a unique user (reuse from rate limiting) to delete a snippet in the next x minutes, or create a unique delete link or something.
• Maybe use a list to filter out snippets that might contain bad words. Instead of disallowing them, we could drop them from the public list.

👥 Contributors

• @m1dnight

• @joshproehl

• @dependabot[bot]