After many years of excellent service by the Oregon State University Open Source Lab the CentOS Project has decided to migrate our web-based pastebin instance to a self-hosted platform running on our infrastructure. This has provided us the opportunity to move to a different solution based on the Stikked pastebin server which is a more modern solution with a number of features we felt would best benefit our user communities:
- Encrypted pastes
- Direct paste replies along with a 'diff' feature which we believe useful for developer collaboration
- Burn on reading / immediate expiry on view
- Anti-spam features
- And a number of behind-the-scenes improvements
The web interface is available at https://paste.centos.org and from there you can paste content directly into the provided web form and optionally add your name or a paste title and even select the language of the paste if you wish the contents to be syntactically colored when displayed. You are able to select a number of time periods for the paste's lifetime from the dropdown selection and may opt to have the paste delete itself on view, so called "burn on view". The option also exists to encrypt your paste if you wish. After you submit the form you can share the resulting URL with others.
Additionally we've made a command line client, cpaste, available to enable pasting directly from your servers / desktops to our pastebin instance. This client is based on the Stikkit client by Petr Bena. This package is in our "extras" repository and can be installed with:
yum --enablerepo=extras install cpaste
Usage information can be retrieved with:
cpaste --help
Examples illustrating how to how the command line client:
Paste a file directly to our server:
cpaste ~/problem.txt
Paste a python code snippet with a title of "code snippet" and an author name of "John Q. Public"
cpaste -l python -t "code snippet" -a "John Q. Public" -i ~/src/project/code.py
Paste the standard output of a process and return only the paste's url:
~/bin/process | cpaste -s
One notable difference between the new and old instances is that the new instance supports paste lifetimes of up to one day only.
We hope you find the new service useful.
We would also like to thank OSUOSL for providing the old pastebin instance for the past many years.