Convos got a built in pastebin

Posted by Jan Henning Thorsen on 9. May, 2017.

Convos has a high focus on privacy. Convos can be run on closed network, and no external resources on the public internet should ever be needed. This ideas was also taken into consideration when we decided bundle a pastebin with Convos. The pastebin implementation stores the data in CONVOS_HOME, meaning you are in full control of the data shared.

The pastebin works like this:

  1. Copy a chunk of multiline text
  2. Paste it into the the input text box in a conversation
  3. Hit enter
  4. Convos will create a paste, and send the link to the past as a message

Here is an example paste:

Example paste

Multiline messages

If the text is three lines (subject to change) or less, then Convos will simply send the them as three messages instead. There is an environment variable that decides how many lines you need to have before it is converted to a paste. It is not public, so changing this might not work in the future, but if you want to play around and tweak the setting, you can try the command below:

CONVOS_MAX_BULK_MESSAGE_SIZE=1 ./script/convos daemon

External pastebin service

There are currently no plan to implement support for sending a paste to an external service, but that doesn't prevent you from making your own. The pastebin is implemented as a plugin, meaning you can create your own and load that instead.

After all... Convos is Open Source!

Want to know more?

Please contact us if you're interested into learning more about how to make a plugin, or have questions about Convos in general.