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I am opening a programming club where I will teach coding. What I want to do is I want to create one folder (for example: PUBLIC) and share it through the local network using WiFi router.

Yes, I can do this using Windows Default Home Network options. I think this is the hard way sharing a folder (identifying IP, saying it to the student, problems with authentication, moreover this is no guarantee that this way will work on Mac OS and Linux OS).

Can you suggest an application which helps me share my folder in an easy way? It would be even better if there will be an interface for browsers, like a website.

What is the best app for sharing a folder with files?

My OS: Windows 8.1 Corporate
RAM: 4GB
CPU: 2.3GHz QuadCore

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3 Answers 3

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Why not set up a Mercurial repository on your server and allow your students to learn about version control at the same time.

  • Running a server is one click, or command line option,
  • They can access it in a controlled manner from Mac, Linux or Windows,
  • You can see, and if necessary revert, changes in a traceable manner
  • They will learn about version control
  • It is free and available for most platforms either commend line or via the thg workbench.
  • The web interface allows a zip download

As a server for the tools that your students may need to download, rather than a file share write a fairly simple index.html containing links to the tools, (on the serve), and serve is with: python -m SimpleHTTPServer 8000 in that directory.

You could also consider a flask based server or a Twisted one for more capabilities.

In either case you would be giving the students a familiar interface, (web browser), to download from and should just need to give them the IP address as the URL.

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  • Thank you for your answer. I think I was unclear on my question. Can I share file which is 8GB(I mean that these are not code files, just ordinary files: SDK, IDE installation files)?
    – Joe Rakhimov
    May 31, 2015 at 14:50
  • Expanded answer above.
    – Steve Barnes
    May 31, 2015 at 15:06
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I would suggest using a standard protocol like FTP for this. In particular FTP allows for strict permission control if that's ever needed, or simply anonymous access (which you can set to be read-only), it's widely supported among many platform and almost every web browser can display a web interface all by itself for read-only access.

As for the server software itself, I can recommend Filezilla Server. It installs itself as a Windows service and provides a control panel for configuring all its options, which includes all the above possibilities. It also supports FTPS should security be needed. It's open source.

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Cloud Storage

Cloud-based storage shouldn't be ruled out: e.g. OneDrive, DropBox, etc. This might be more advantegeous because many people (especially tech-savvy programmers) would already be users. And these services have easy-to-use browser GUIs. Furthermore, this allows users to access the resources at home, outside of sessions as well.

P2P

Peer-to-peer software could also be useful (and tenable given the tech-savvy target audience), allowing you to take advantage of the local network for increased file transfer speeds. BitTorrent Sync for instance has client software for Windows & OSX as well as a web GUI for Linux

web gui

Synchronisation is fast locally and there's no software limit on the size of files that can be synchronised using the service.

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