Sharing Files

Use sharing to make a file or directory publicly visible to the world.

Publishing Files

You can make individual files and folders public. First, do either of the following:

  • With the file open, click the info icon info, then in the menu that drops down, click square Share.
  • In the Files listing for your project, check the box in the leftmost column for your file, and click square Share. You can also select more than one file in order to share them together (e.g. an HTML page that includes images)

After either of these steps, you can see the “Share” dialog. You may enter a description for the file being shared, then click Make item public and your file is shared.

_images/share-dialog.png

Using the Share Server

After clicking Make item public as above, the public URL will be displayed under Shared publicly. You can click the external button to open it at the share server.

With that link, your file is available read-only on the CoCalc lightweight share server. A CoCalc login is not needed to access files on the share server. Files on the share server are indexed by Google unless you click the checkbox next to “Unlisted: Only allow those with a link to view this.”.

Directly sharing files from your project

You have another choice after making a file public as in the first section above. For instances when you simply want to copy files between projects, use the exact URL of the file in your project as shown at the top of your browser. This link is slower to load, but other users can easily copy files to their own CoCalc projects by doing the following:

  • Log into CoCalc and open the project link to a shared file.
  • Open the Files list for the shared project, i.e. in the tab for the shared file, click the Files button at upper left.
  • Click Copy, then under In the project, select the destination project and under Destination select the destination folder for the copy of the shared file.

Note that, unlike URLs for the share server, the project containing the shared file must be running for project URL’s to work. Since it can take several seconds for a project to start running, this can introduce an additional delay when viewing such files.

File-sharing Tips

  • If your document depends on auxiliary files (e.g., images embedded in a markdown file) make sure these auxiliary files are also published. A convenient way to do this is to have auxiliary files in a common folder and share that folder.
  • Serving raw files: you can host arbitrary html, etc. through the share server. Files can be viewed in “raw” form, i.e. without CoCalc controls, by opening in the share server and clicking “Raw” at upper right, or by removing the parameter setting ?viewer=share from the share server URL for the file.
  • Interactive elements that use server processes, such as notebooks with Jupyter widgets and worksheets with Sage @interact, will not operate in files viewed from the share server. That is because documents on the share server are truly static. There is no kernel or Sage server running in the background to facilitate any sort of interactive computing. Controls that run completely in the browser, for example in 3d plots like this cardiod, will work when served from the share server.

Note

If you would like to collaborate and chat with other people on documents in your project, go the Project Settings tab and “Add people to project”.