Ask HN: Would you use this? (Self-Hosted Pasetbin/Gist Application)

1 point

11 years ago

In trying to come up with a fun side project with a small enough scope, the idea I'm currently settled on is essentially a self-hosted, open source Pastebin/Gist application. I feel as though something like this would be very useful for development teams (especially remote teams?) who want to share snippets of code/text/etc., but need to do so in a closed, secure environment.

If this is something you would use, what features would you care about the most?

I feel as though a project like this needs to have a very streamlined deployment mechanism and a small footprint for external dependencies. Backing each gist/paste with a Git repository like Gist does would prevent the application from being installed in environments such as Heroku. When you use Gist, do you generally go back and edit your gists or care about the version history? Personally I don't very often. Is the fork feature of Gist or the ability to easily download and update them by cloning them as Git repositories an important feature to you? These are the main questions I'd like to answer for myself before I really start to work on the project, because of the obvious impact the answer will have on the basic architecture and deployment options.

A slightly related tangent to this idea was to have a portion of the client-side part of the application be something like Mailvelope (https://github.com/mailvelope/mailvelope) that manages a client-side GPG keyring and allows you to encrypt/decrypt the contents of each gist/paste before it goes to the server (you would be able to choose among any other user in the application who has their public key uploaded as a recipient, and your private key would be importable to an encrypted client-only store of some sort in the browser). I'm not sure how much use this particular feature would be for the main use case I envisioned above, but it would be fun to implement :)

Looking forward to anyone's feedback!