Anypaste is a tool for uploading files to public-facing hosting sites such as pastebins, transfer.sh, Imgur, and Gfycat. Anypaste automatically detects the type of file being uploaded and chooses an appropriate site accordingly. Anypaste has a plugin system for adding new hosting sites. Anypaste is perfect for sharing content on Reddit, IRC, Discord, Email, forums, or anywhere else that links can go.
The complete guide to installing, using, and making plugins for Anypaste.
Anypaste is a tool for uploading files to public-facing websites. Ideally, you can run anypaste /path/to/file
and several things will happen:
file
and other utilities to determine the type of the file.Anypaste is written in Bash, and was designed to support Linux and macOS. It should also work on other *nix-y systems, like FreeBSD or the Windows Subsystem for Linux, but some desktop integration features (namely the --copy
and --notify
command line parameters) will probably have issues.
Anypaste is just a single, cross-platform executable! That’s because it’s a shell script. You can download it from https://anypaste.xyz/sh, which will just redirect you to the raw file hosted on GitHub.
Quick installation:
sudo mkdir -p /usr/local/bin # only needed on macOS
sudo curl -Lo /usr/local/bin/anypaste https://anypaste.xyz/sh
sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/anypaste
Bash, curl, and POSIX core utils are all you need. ffprobe
is optional but can provide more accurate compatibility checking for media file types; typically it comes inside of an ffmpeg
package.
anypaste -h
as well as here.
-p
: Specify part of a plugin name to use.-t
: Comma-separated list of required tags. For example, -t private,permanent
will only match plugins that keep your file indefinitely and don’t publicly list links.-f
: Skip compatibility checks (force).-i
: Interactive mode. Check it out, super cool!-n
: Specify a custom name for the file (displayed only on certain sites).-c
: Specify a path to a custom configuration file.-C
: Create a default configuration file. Everything will be commented out by default. See Configuration for more info.-l
, --list
: List all currently installed plugins in human-readable form. Can be combined with other options, if so it will list the plugins that would otherwise be attempted for upload.--list-machine
: Same as -l
, but for use inside of other scripts. It prints the raw get_info
output from each plugin, with a blank line between plugins and at the end.-x
, --copy
, --notify
: See Post-Upload Hooks.-v
, --version
: Print version.-h
, --help
: Print help text.Anypaste’s configuration file is a small shell script which sets environment variables. As such, if you know how to write Bash, you know how to write Anypaste config. Here’s a cheat sheet:
export var_name='I am a string'
.export var_name=647
.export arr_name=('I am a string' 42 'This is the third element')
.# don't unset this or everything will break! Not sure why...
.The export
preceding variable names tells Bash to pass these variables to subprocesses. The export
is only necessary when configuring external plugins, i.e plugins that aren’t built-in to Anypaste.
To create your configuration file, run anypaste -C
. It will tell you where the config file was put. It will typically be ~/.config/anypaste.conf
on Linux and ~/.anypaste.conf
on Mac. Everything is commented out by default.
Option | Description | Default |
---|---|---|
ap_plugins |
List of enabled plugins, in order of precedence | See config file |
ap_hooks |
List of hooks that are enabled by default | Empty |
ap_hook_policy |
If set to “greedy”, hooks will be run after every file uploaded. If set to “lazy”, they will only be run just before Anypaste exits. | lazy |
ap_unicode |
Whether to prettify things with unicode characters. Mainly used in anypaste -l . |
true |
ap_color |
Whether to colorize the output. | true |
ap_copy_regex |
The regular expression to determine which line to copy from when --copy is used. |
. (matches first line) |
ap_ua |
User-agent to use | Anypaste 1.15 (or other version) |
Hooks run after Anypaste finishes uploading a file. Anypaste has two built-in hooks:
-x
or --copy
command-line options. By default it copies the “main” link, i.e. the one that begins with Link:
. If you wish to copy a different link, say the “direct” links, you can set the ap_copy_regex
config option to the regex pattern which will match the line containing the link you want. For direct links, you can do export ap_copy_regex=Direct
.--notify
. It uses notify-send
on Linux to achieve a cross-desktop-environment experience, but some distros may not ship with it. On Mac, it should “just work” out of the box.You can change how hooks work when multiple files are uploaded using ap_hook_policy
. If it is set to lazy
(the default), hooks will only run after the last file in a batch. If set to greedy
, they will be run after every file.
Custom hooks can be added to the ap_hooks
array in the config file. They have access to the same environment variables as plugins, but additionally can see the output of the last plugin in ap_last_stdout
. Custom hooks are able to work in combination with built-in plugins; both will run. Example: Adding the following to your config file will save every link uploaded with Anypaste to ~/Other/anypaste-links.txt
:
ap_hook_policy=greedy
ap_hooks=('echo -n "$ap_last_stdout" | grep ^Link: | head -n 1 >> ~/Other/anypaste-links.txt')
Anypaste plugins are each single executable files (except for the built-in ones, which are bundled inside the main Anypaste executable). The recommended way to “install” a plugin is to download it from its author’s website (hopefully a GitHub release), mark it as executable (chmod +x plugin-file
), then put it in ~/.anypaste-plugins
(you may need to create this folder). Alternatively, you could put it anywhere in your $PATH
. After that, you must enable the plugin by adding it to the ap_plugins
array in your config file. Remember that this array is in order of precedence – if you put it at the end, it will almost never be used!
We are always looking for more plugins. If you know a good hosting site that’s been around for at least three years, open a Github issue and I will consider adding it!
Note that plugins sometimes break when the site is updated. I occasionally check the plugins and update them. However, this means that the Anypaste version listed in the table may not actually work – make sure to update Anypaste before reporting any issues!
Name | File Types | Extra Notes | Anypaste version |
---|---|---|---|
Sendvid | Videos | 1.0 | |
Streamable | Videos | Requires authentication. | 1.0 |
Gfycat | Videos (Gifs) | Short videos only. | 1.0 |
Imgur | Images | Uses a hardcoded API key. | 1.1 |
Pixhost | Images | 10MB upload limit. | 1.1.4 |
ix.io | Text | 1.0 | |
Pastie | Text | 1.1.4 | |
P.defau.lt | Text | 1.1.4 | |
Paste2 | Text | 1.1.4 | |
Hastebin | Text | Frequent downtimes. | 1.0 |
Docdroid | Documents | Requires authentication. | 1.0 |
Gofile | Generic | Unlimited size, official API. | 1.1.4 |
Bayfiles | Generic | 20GB limit, Official API. | 1.1.4 |
Filemail | Generic | 50GB upload limit. | 1.1.3 |
Transfer.sh | Generic | 10GB upload limit. | 1.1 |
Keep.sh | Generic | 500MB upload limit. | 1.1.3 |
File.io | Generic | Files deleted after first download. | 1.0 |
Want to see your plugin on this list? Open an issue!
Name | Description | Plugin Homepage |
---|---|---|
ThinImg | A simple plugin created mainly to serve as an example about how to make third-party plugins. Note that thinimg.com has gone down since this plugin was created, so it is useful only for pedagogical purposes. See Making Plugins for more information. | GitHub |
An Anypaste plugin is just an executable file (Bash will be used for all examples, but you can use any language you wish). This executable file is called with a single argument, which instructs the plugin on what to do. Additional data is not passed on the command line, but rather supplied through environment variables which the plugin can read at will. Here’s a list of “commands” (the command line arguments) that can be passed to your plugin, and what your plugin should do in each situation:
check_eligibility
The plugin should determine whether the file being uploaded is compatible with this plugin. Typically, this involves checking that $ap_mime
is a supported MIME type and that $ap_size
is not over the site’s size limit. The plugin should exit with an exit code of 0
if it’s compatible, or non-zero if it is incompatible. This step should not involve any sort of network communications.
upload
The plugin should perform the actual upload. Typically this involves using curl
to upload the file at $ap_path
, using whatever API the site provides. It might also use $ap_human_name
to set the name of the file on the site being uploaded to, if the site supports that. Any warnings, errors, or progress bars should be outputted to stderr. If the upload completes successfully, the plugin should output a blank line to stdout, followed by the links, followed by another blank line. Each “link” should consist of some sort of label, followed by :
, then followed by the actual link. Here’s an example output:
Link: https://imgur.com/abcdef
Direct: https://i.imgur.com/abcdef.png
Edit: https://imgur.com/edit/abcdef/secret
Delete: https://imgur.com/delete/abcdef/secret
Your plugin should try to use “standard” names before the :
whenever possible. This makes Anypaste’s behavior more consistent, and makes it easier to use inside of other scripts. If there’s something special about a link that a user should know, it’s better to output it to stderr before the links rather than stdout with the links. When in doubt, look at the built-in plugins and try to act as similarly to them as possible.
Exit with a code of 0
if the upload was successful, or non-zero otherwise.
get_info
The plugin should output “static” information about itself (metadata). Most of the environment variables will not be available during this step. Your plugin should output its information in an ini-like format. Each “section” should start with [section-name]
, then any lines after that until the next section are the contents. Blank lines are ignored. For example:
[description]
This is a cool plugin for uploading to imgur.com
[tags]
permanent
editable
deletable
[config]
required|imgur_api_public|Public API key
requied|imgur_api_secret|Private API secret
List of possible sections:
name
: A human-readable name of the plugin. Often just a capitalized version of the machine-readable name.description
: A human-readable description of what this plugin does.tags
: The plugin’s tags, line-separated.config
: Has lines in the format requiredness|name|description
. Each is an additional environment variable/configuration option that the user may supply via anypaste.conf
. requiredness
should be either optional
, in which case it is purely cosmetic for display in anypaste -l
, recommended
, which will trigger a warning whenever the plugin is run without that option, and required
, which will consider the plugin incompatible if that option is missing. name
is the name of the environment variable for this option. description
is cosmetic and human-readable.Config options are just environment variables which are set in the config file. You don’t have to do anything special to get access to them. Keep in mind that they are in a “global” scope, so name them in a way that they don’t interfere with other config options (e.g, don’t name an option “api_key”; instead, use “imgur_api_key”)
The official example plugin for ThinImg is a great learning resource. However, ThinImg is very simple, and we don’t make use of some of the features plugins can have. If you want to see more fleshed-out plugins, look in the first several hundred lines of the main Anypaste source code – that’s where all the built-in plugins are.
Plugins and hooks have access to a number of environment variables. This is the primary way to get information about the currently uploading file.
Variable | Description |
---|---|
ap_path |
The absolute path to the uploading file on-disk. |
ap_human_name |
The name specified using -n or inferred from the file name. |
ap_file_info |
Output of file "$ap_path" , contains lots of useful file metadata. |
ap_mime |
Mime type of the file (from file --mime-type --brief "$ap_path" ). |
ap_ffprobe |
Output of ffprobe -show_streams -show_format "$ap_path" . Null if ffprobe is not installed. Often provides more accurate and reliable info that file can for audio and video. |
ap_size |
Size of the file, in bytes (from wc -c ). |
ap_plugin |
The name of the plugin as it appears in ap_plugins . |
ap_version |
Current Anypaste version. |
ap_mac |
true if running on Mac, false otherwise. |
There are many other variables set by Anypaste, but they are meant for internal use only and may change without warning.