onionshare(1)

💖 ONIONSHARE 💖

okay so bestie, welcome to onionshare(1) — the manual page. yes it's section 1, yes it's iconic, let's get into it 🧚

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✨ NAME ✨

onionshare — a tool for anonymously sharing and receiving files over a temporarily set up Tor Hidden service. that's the whole vibe, periodt 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

onionshare [ -v ] [ --filenames filenames... ]

short, sweet, slay. that's literally it.

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so OnionShare lets you anonymously share files, or receive files. and since version 2.2 it can also serve as a webserver where you serve static HTML files. no cap. OnionShare has four different operating modes:

• the default mode, for sharing files
• receive mode, for receiving files
• public mode, for sharing files with a large audience
• website mode

when you use OnionShare, a web server gets started, which makes OnionShare reachable as a Tor Onion Service over the Internet. an unguessable address is generated, and you can share it so the recipient opens it in a tor client — like Tor Browser — to download, upload, or consult files. traffic between their device and your onion service is end-to-end encrypted. no separate server, no third party file-sharing service required. you host the files on your own computer, acting as a server, for as long as the program is running. main character behaviour fr fr 👑

OnionShare can be configured to run with its built-in version of tor, a TorBrowser, or system tor running in the background. by default, OnionShare uses its built-in version of Tor.

OnionShare's default behaviour is to shut down the hidden service and stop once the files have been up or downloaded.

Public mode — if you're sharing the unguessable URL with many peers, please enable "Public mode", otherwise OnionShare might interpret multiple accesses as an attack and shut down the hidden service. 💀 so like, don't do that to yourself.

Receive Mode — lets people upload files to your OnionShare via Tor Browser. 🫶

Website Mode — allows you to publish a website as an onion service. when selecting the files to share, make sure you select multiple files in a folder if you want the entire directory to be published as a website. when the directory contains an index.html file (along with any static files such as images, CSS etc), then the site will be viewable on the Tor network as an onion service as the actual website itself (not as an OnionShare interface). the onion service will render HTML in Tor Browser just like any other website. if you don't have an index.html, OnionShare will show a directory listing of your files instead. in directory listing, each file can be opened, and there is no download button for the compressed archive. OnionShare does not share your original website files. instead, it creates a copy of those files in a temporary folder and shares those copies. lowkey genius 🌈

Automatic start and stop — the auto-start timer allows you to schedule a share to start at some time in the future. ⏰

for detailed and up-to-date information — such as using OnionShare with bridges — refer to the authors' public documentation at https://github.com/micahflee/onionshare/wiki/ 📚

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💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -h, --help — show this help message and exit. yes bestie, the classic.
• --local-only — Don't use Tor (only for development). ⚠️ development only, don't get it twisted.
• -v, --verbose — Log OnionShare errors to stdout, and web errors to disk. for when you need to see everything.
• --filenames filenames [filenames ...] — List of files or folders to share. give it as many as you want, it's flexible like that. 🍓

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ok that's the whole page, no detail left behind, we ate and left no crumbs 🎀

signing off from the onionshare(1) manual, July, 2022 edition — this was onionshare(1), version-flavoured as ever. byeeee 💜🦋✨