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Sometimes you just need that one file, and it'd be really nice if you just had a simple application

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that ran in a web browser that gave you access to your files.

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Well, today we're going to be taking a look at CopyParty.

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This turns almost any device into a file server.

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It's a really simple Python application that did the rounds a few months ago.

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It's just taken me a while to get around to covering it.

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And this application we're going to run in a container.

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We're going to put on our tail nets, of course, because that's what we do here on the TailScale channel.

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I'm also going to show you some new Docker Compose secrets, tricks of how you can configure

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not only the CopyParty application itself directly in your Compose YAML files,

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but also the TailScaleServe sidecar piece directly in your Docker Compose YAMLs as well.

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Now, I'll put a link in the description to all of the materials about CopyParty,

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such as this fantastic YouTube video, 16 minutes long,

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it goes through all of the different features

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that CopyParty has.

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It's brilliant.

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It does a better job than I could possibly manage.

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We're going to focus, like I say,

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on the Docker Compose aspects today

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and deploying this thing onto your tail net.

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Now, you've seen on the channel many times before

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that I deploy applications with the main application

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and then a tailscale sidecar container.

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And the downside of that, in fact,

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if you look in this long list of apps

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we've covered on this channel over the years. The downside of that is that you need this kind of

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sidecar volume mounted serve.json file. It's a very simple file. All it essentially does is it tells

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the tailscale serve to listen on port 443 to proxy this port from inside the container onto your

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tail net using tailscale serve. I've always wished that it was a simple way to do that without bind

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mounting a separate file well i found one i found one it's been right under my nose this whole time

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docker compose has this configs top level element built into the yaml configuration schema of docker

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compose so what we can do is we can define okay this is just the json blob we looked at earlier

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kind of minified ish so that it fits more comfortably inside our compose file and doesn't

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like WordWrap or anything.

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What we can do is we can define these elements

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inside our config files,

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and then we can reference them later on

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inside our configurations.

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That's it, that's the cool trick.

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So what this does is it ingests this content block up here,

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lines four through eight,

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and then spits it out into a file

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inside the remote container.

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So let's take a little look

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at the copy party application itself.

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It is super basic.

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It's just a file browser that runs inside a web browser.

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Effectively, you know, I can select an image,

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I can view an image, I can go through here

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and look at my obsession with the Volkswagen Golf.

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This was Wookiees in the Woods, by the way, a few years ago.

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Fantastic event if you're a Volkswagen enthusiast like me.

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And you know, I can see all of my images

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that I've taken over the years.

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In fact, these are the same images

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that were powering the image video that came out last week.

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So I'm gonna log in now using the username and password

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configured in my compose file.

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It literally right now is change me.

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And now I just want to create a new directory.

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I'm just going to call this test

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because I want to show you how fast this thing is.

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I'm going to bring up a directory full of a bunch of test photos.

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And then if I just drop this into the browser like so, ready?

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Here we go.

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We're uploading, I don't know, 25 files, 22 files.

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And that's it, it's done.

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And we can now bring these up full screen and have a look at them.

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We can download them.

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We can fetal them.

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We can rotate them.

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It also supports rich media.

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So if you've got an audio file, for example, let me look on my desktop,

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where I've almost certainly got a recording that I'm using for this video.

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Let me just upload that here.

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And we can play those audio files in the browser.

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There we go.

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So now I could use this as a low-rent podcast player if I wanted to.

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The other option it does as well, can I see?

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Yeah, it renders the spectral waveform of the file.

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I just think that's a really cool,

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nice little touch from CopyParty.

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There are tons and tons and tons

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of other features to this thing.

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For example, if I wanted to download

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the entire directory as a zip file,

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which can be really handy sometimes,

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I just click this little button down here.

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No right-click menus, no doing silliness,

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and there you go.

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There's my test directory now as a zip file

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on my local system.

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There is a way you can mount CopyParty as a webdav,

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So if you go up to this option up here and say connect,

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you can basically turn your copy party instance into like a remote file server

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that appears as a mounted network share inside your computer.

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And you can, of course, do this all over TailScale when it's on your TailNet.

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And he supports multiple different ways.

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You've got WebDAV, you've got PartyFuse, iShare,

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as well as all the different operating systems using Rclone

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and all the other stuff that exists in the world.

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I can't say enough good things about this app.

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Honestly, it's really simple.

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It's really simple considering it's just a bunch of Python.

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And it just does what it needs to do really well.

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So let's take a little look at some of the lifecycle stuff

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around the config stanzas inside Docker Compose.

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You can see that, as I showed you earlier,

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we have the tailscale serve configuration,

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but we also have the copy party configuration as well.

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It's a very simple application to configure.

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And so I thought it was a perfect example for today's video.

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You can see how the config for TS serve gets reused later on in the file just down here.

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And then the same thing applies also to the copy party configuration as well.

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So how does this get passed through on the remote side?

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What does it look like inside the container?

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Well, let's take a look at the copy party TS serve container.

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We're going to look inside copy party TS.

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Now I've SSH'd into fake NAS, which is where this application is actually running.

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And I'm going to do this command, docker exec copy party TS.

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and I want to see what the config looks like,

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the serve config looks like inside that remote container.

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Because if we look at the YAML file look,

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this gets passed through and mapped almost as a target

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in /config/serve.json, which is the file path here

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that I'm going to print out to the terminal

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and we're going to have a look at.

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And you can see this block here matches perfectly

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this block here inside my compose file.

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But what if I want to make a change?

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This is where it can get a little bit, I don't know,

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like I just expected it to work a different way than what it actually does.

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But we'll get there.

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Let's make the change to the compose.yaml file.

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And I want to change tailscalefunnel to be true for this node, for example.

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Now, if I do that and modify the compose file and then do a Docker compose restart,

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I've restarted the copyparty and the copyparty tailscale containers, the sidecast.

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But if I do the same exec command look, it still says false.

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even though our compose file says, our survey says,

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even though our compose file says true right here.

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It does seem logical that that would work, doesn't it?

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But the problem here is that the restart process

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only stops the process inside the container

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and then starts the container again.

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It doesn't run any of the container creation

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or instantiation routines that look at the config files

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in your YAML file.

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It doesn't recompute the hash and say,

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hey, something's changed.

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We should probably update this.

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The container itself will still exist, the same container, the same file system, the same mounted configuration object from when it was first created.

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Compose won't go back and read that config file until you recreate the container.

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So that leaves us with really only a couple of options.

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And the one that I've sort of landed on is to use Docker Compose up force recreate.

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So this is a lifecycle issue.

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So if we can do a force recreate, then we're all good to go.

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So I'm going to do this.

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I'm going to do docker compose up minus D dash dash force recreate.

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And look what happens to our YAML file.

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Our funnel block now reads true.

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So if you're using these config blocks to define configs for applications,

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you need to understand that they work differently to bind mounts.

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They don't update in real time inside the container.

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Docker Compose only reads these config blocks at container creation time, at container instantiation time.

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So to make a change to those underlying configs and for them to be passed through to the containers,

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you just have to recreate the container every time.

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It's a small workflow tweak, but a really, really important one.

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So that's kind of the gotcha with Docker Compose configs.

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They're read once when the container is created,

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and then they're locked in until you recreate that container completely.

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It's not obvious, and the docs don't exactly make this crystal clear, that whole life cycle of the container piece.

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So hopefully this saves some of you from the debugging headache that I had today.

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So let me know in the comments what other stuff is hiding in the Docker Compose documentation that I've probably completely missed.

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This has been one of my favorite little discoveries of the last few weeks.

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Now, I have to say a great big thank you to all of you for watching throughout 2025.

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And here is to a prosperous and successful 2026 to all of you.

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Thank you so much for watching.

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I've been Alex from Tailscale.