Secure File Sharing Platform

A full-stack, secure file sharing application designed to let users safely upload, manage, and distribute files via encrypted Cloudflare R2 object storage. Features a modern React frontend and a robust Node.js/Express backend, with PostgreSQL (Neon) for metadata and relationship management.

🚀 Features

• Secure Object Storage: All generic files are stored seamlessly into Cloudflare R2 via securely generated short-lived AWS S3 Pre-signed URLs.
• Granular Link Sharing: Generate tokenized share links with custom expiry times (expires_at) and specific scoped permissions (view or download).
• In-App File Viewer: Directly preview images, videos, and PDFs right from the browser window securely using the customized Vite frontend app.
• Auto-Redirect Direct Downloads: Automatically triggers secure file downloads for users visiting links configured strictly for downloading.
• JWT Authentication: Strict JSON Web Token based stateless sessions.
• API Security: Fully configured with helmet, cors, and express-rate-limit to handle rapid deployments to services like Render and Vercel.

🛠️ Technology Stack

Frontend:

• React 18
• Vite
• React Router DOM
• CSS Modules & Inline Styling Framework

Backend:

• Node.js & Express.js
• PostgreSQL (Powered by Neon) + pg driver
• @aws-sdk/client-s3 (For Cloudflare R2 integration)
• JSON Web Tokens (JWT) & bcrypt

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💻 Local Development Setup

Prerequisites

• Node.js (v18+)
• A PostgreSQL Database (e.g., Neon.tech)
• A Cloudflare R2 bucket with API keys.

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/kash-gg/Secure-File-Sharing-Platform.git
cd Secure-File-Sharing-Platform

2. Backend Setup

cd backend
npm install

Create a .env file in the backend folder:

PORT=5000
DATABASE_URL=postgresql://<user>:<password>@<host>/<dbname>?sslmode=require
JWT_SECRET=your_super_secret_jwt_key

# Cloudflare R2 Configuration
R2_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your_cloudflare_access_key
R2_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your_cloudflare_secret_key
R2_BUCKET_NAME=your_bucket_name
R2_ENDPOINT=https://<account_id>.r2.cloudflarestorage.com

# For production cross-domain cookie configurations (Vercel -> Render)
NODE_ENV=development
FRONTEND_URL=http://localhost:5173

Run database migrations:

npm run migrate

Start the backend standard development server:

npm run dev

3. Frontend Setup

In a new terminal window:

cd frontend
npm install

Create a .env file in the frontend folder:

VITE_API_BASE_URL=http://localhost:5000

Start the Vite development server:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:5173 in your browser.

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🌐 Production Deployment Guide

This app is optimized for a split-deployment model: Frontend on Vercel, and Backend on Render.

1. Render Deployment (Backend)

1. Create a Web Service on Render pointing to your backend/ directory.
2. Set Build Command to npm install and Start Command to npm start.
3. Fill out all .env variables from above directly into the Render Environment dashboard.
4. Critically: Ensure you set NODE_ENV=production inside Render so that cross-site cookies are configured with SameSite: "none".

2. Vercel Deployment (Frontend)

1. Import your project into Vercel and set the "Root Directory" to frontend.
2. Vercel should auto-detect Vite as your preset framework.
3. Under Environment Variables, set VITE_API_BASE_URL to your live Render backend URL (e.g., https://my-backend.onrender.com).
4. The project incorporates a vercel.json file inside frontend/ to fix Single Page Application (SPA) routing 404 errors by default.

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Built with ❤️ for Secure Data Management.