paste

A sensible, modern pastebin.

Idea

Pretty much every pastebin sucks. When Gist removed anonymous pastes, I realised that the pastebins out there don't do what I want them to do. I made paste to remedy that problem.

There should be a pastebin that's easy-to-use and simple, supporting multiple files, syntax highlighting, anonymity, and secure authentication. Now there is.

Status

paste's API is stable. Any breaking changes, including route renames, will come with a version bump to the API.

paste's web interface, backend, routes, and code are all unstable. There may be heinous bugs. However, I would note that both myself and a few others use paste as our daily pastebins without issue.

Contact

Join the Discord server for questions, comments, and general paste-y community!

Contributing

Important: Ensure you clone the repository with submodules and git-lfs!
Make sure git-lfs is installed, then run git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/ascclemens/paste.git.

To set up a development environment with a debug build of paste, use paste.sh in the script directory! Just run scripts/paste.sh by itself to show help.

• Run scripts/paste.sh start to start the server and generate any missing config files and a self-signed certificate.
• If this is your first run, paste will need to build diesel_cli and paste itself, which can take some time.
  • Use scripts/paste.sh logs to keep track of the compilation. Note that sidekiq will fail to start until compilation completes. You will be able to access nginx, but you will receive a gateway error until paste finishes compiling and starts.
• Once Rocket says it's ready, access https://localhost and accept the self-signed certificate.

Changes to the HTML templates and static resources should take effect on reload, but changes to any Rust will need a scripts/paste.sh compose restart backend to recompile.

Using a pre-existing paste server

I host paste.gg. I am poor and can't afford a good machine (paste.gg is a DigitalOcean droplet – three cores and low-ish RAM), so please don't bombard it!

Setting up your own paste server (production, Docker)

You can run your own paste server by using docker-compose. You will need Docker, obviously.

The Docker image will build and run (in release mode) the server as it is in the repository. That is to say that whatever you have checked out will be built and run.

Edit configuration files

First, you'll need to set up your configuration. All configuration files are missing by default. You will need to copy over their examples files and edit those. The example files follow this pattern:

If you need ./Rocket.toml, the example file will be located at ./Rocket.example.toml.

1. .docker/nginx/nginx.conf

   Change anything you deem necessary.

2. .docker/nginx/sites/paste.conf

   This one breaks the naming scheme, since nginx will load anything that matches *.conf in that directory!

   File is commented with what changes are necessary and notes.

3. Rocket.toml

   Read the comments. Set a secret key. The repo is included in this Docker container, so certs can be specified at .docker/nginx/run/certs.

4. config.toml

   Change everything, basically. Read the comments.

5. sidekiq.yml

   Probably fine, but change queue concurrency if you need to.

6. sidekiq.sh

   This is a convenience script for you. Change the variables at the start for starting sidekiq properly to work with paste.

7. .env

   Change this to the below.

   DATABASE_URL=postgres://paste:paste@postgres/paste
   REDIS_URL=redis://redis
   SIDEKIQ_URL=redis://redis/1
   EMAIL_TEMPLATES=webserver/web/emails/*
   # if you want to enable camo, fill out the two variables below
   # the camo url will be accessible at your externally-facing hostname, so change the name below
   # CAMO_URL=https://your.hostname/camo/
   # this should be a random string
   # CAMO_KEY=BNdLplouhYWXEFHlK2v7pO8oxOcbCL3iShURSD5HVhpaJOsyYFsK7yjZx6CSYPSA

Start the server

# from the repo root
docker-compose -p paste -f .docker/docker-compose.yml up

If everything is configured correctly, it should start up, and you should see Rocket has launched from https://0.0.0.0:8000. Note that this is not how the outside world will access paste.

nginx is set up to expose ports 80 and 443 on the host by default, but you can change docker-compose.yml (and you'll need to change nginx.conf as well) to change that.

Access paste by connecting to the host via HTTPS.

Done!

Setting up your own paste server (production, manual)

You will need

• Rust (nightly channel required)
• Ruby
• modern postgres (9.x+ tested)
• redis
• sidekiq
• nginx
• camo (optional)

Steps

1. Clone the repo (--recursive for submodules)

2. cargo install diesel_cli --no-default-features --features postgres

3. Copy the example config files

   • cp Rocket{.example,}.toml; cp config{.example,}.toml; cp sidekiq{.example,}.yml

4. Edit the config files

5. cargo build --release

6. Create a postgres database and user

7. echo 'DATABASE_URL=postgres://username@/database' > .env

8. diesel migration run --migration-dir=webserver/migrations

9. Make sure a redis server is running and set the URL in .env

10. Start sidekiq using sidekiq.sh edited to be correct

11. (Optional) Start a camo server and edit .env to contain the secret key and the public-facing URL for it.

12. Preferably use ROCKET_ENV=prod and set a secret key in Rocket.toml

    • See Rocket docs

13. target/release/paste config.toml

14. Reverse proxy and handle /static/ with a webserver and not the included route. nginx configuration below.

    location /static/ {
      alias /path/to/repo/webserver/web/static/;
    }

Command-line client

A compatible and recommended command-line client for paste is bins.

Compiling

If you just want to compile paste, perhaps to test while making a contribution, there is a Docker image that has a set-up build environment.

# from repo root
docker run --rm -it -v "$(pwd)":/paste jkcclemens/paste

By default, that will build paste, but you can also append /bin/bash to the command to start a Bash shell in the working environment.

API

See the paste API documentation.