Skip to content
Contact Support

FileSender

FileSender is a service that allows users to send data easily and securely. It is possible to send and receive data via a web-based graphical user interface (GUI) as well as a Command Line Interface (CLI) using the Filesender API. These instructions show how to use both the web-based GUI and command line to send and receive data using FileSender.

Using FileSender: Web-based GUI

Sending Data using the FileSender Web-based GUI

  1. Go to https://filesender.reannz.co.nz
  2. If asked, click Login and Sign-in through your Tuakiri login. You may not need to do this if you have already signed into FileSender before.
  3. You can then drag & drop or click to select a file to transfer or you can select an entire directory to upload to FileSender

Receiving Data using the FileSender Web-based GUI

  1. Go to your emails where you should have been sent an email from FileSender.
  2. Click on the Download link in the email link. This will take you to a FileSender website where you can download your files.
  3. You will be presented a list of the files that you can download. Click on the FileSender Download Icon icon. This will download your file to you downloands folder on your computer.

If you would like to download all files together in a tar or zip file, you can do this by clicking on the Download as single (.zip) file or the Download as single (.tar) file button.

Using FileSender: API-based Command Line Interface

Sending Data using the filesender utility

Initialising your FileSender Configuration

To send data to your FileSender account using the FileSender API, we first have to configure FileSender You only need to do this once.

  1. Go to https://filesender.reannz.co.nz
  2. If asked, click Login and Sign-in through your Tuakiri login. You may not need to do this if you have already signed into FileSender before.
  3. Click My profile at the top-right of the page.
  4. Near the bottom of the page under Remote authentication, click the New API secret button. This will create a new authenticator secret key.

  5. In the terminal on the machine you would like to send/receive data from, type:

    mkdir -p ~/.filesender

  6. Open the filesender.py.ini file (e.g. nano ~/.filesender/filesender.py.ini to open with the text editor nano) and add the following, where you need to replace:

    • TUAKIRI_LOGIN_EMAIL with your Tuakiri login email (This is your university or industrial email)
    • FILESENDER_API_KEY with the new authenticator secret key from step 4.
    [system]
base_url = https://filesender.reannz.co.nz/rest.php
default_transfer_days_valid = 10

[user]
username = TUAKIRI_LOGIN_EMAIL
apikey = FILESENDER_API_KEY

    Close and save with ctrl x, ctrl y, Enter

Sending data using the command line

Once you have completed your FileSender configuration, you can upload files to FileSender by typing into the terminal:

module load FileSender
filesender -p -r person-to-send-to@emailserver.edu research-data-file.txt

where:

  • person-to-send-to@emailserver.edu: This is the email address of the persion that you would like to send your data to. This can be any email address, not necessarily an educational email address. This can also be your own email address if you are wanting move data between your local machine and mahuika.
  • research-data-file.txt This is the file you would like to send. This can be any file.

You can find more options for filesender by running filesender --help in the terminal or at https://github.com/NFAcz/filesender-python-uploader?tab=readme-ov-file#usage

Warning

This may take some time if you are uploading a big file.

You can send multiple files by tarballing the files up:

tar -cvf tarball_file.tar folder_to_tarball

To untar the tarball:

tar -xvf tarball_file.tar

Receiving data using the command line

  1. Look for an email from REANNZ FileSender, or possibly another FilSender provider such as AARNet.
  2. Click on the Download link in the email link. This will take you to a FileSender website where you can download your files.
  3. You will be presented a list of the files that you can download. Right-click on the FileSender Download Icon icon and click Copy Link Address

  4. In your terminal (in either your local machine or Mahuika), type:

    curl -O -J -L -R "<copied_website>"

    NOTE: replace with the path you copied. Keep the double quotation "" marks as these are needed.

  5. You will see your file download to through your terminal.