Public Share Control

Give admins and share owners more control over public folder links: hide specific entries of the "New" menu per link, and give visitors a one-click upload button.

Contents

• What it does
• Requirements
• Installation
• Uninstalling
• Usage
• Admin settings
• Good to know
• Building from source
• Releasing (maintainers)
• Support
• License

What it does

1. Per-link "New" menu control. Every public folder share's sharing panel gets a dropdown listing each entry the visitor's "New" menu would normally show (new folder, document, spreadsheet, whiteboard, diagram, the Text app's "Add folder description", …), with a checkbox per entry. All entries are selected (visible) by default. Deselect individual ones — or use "Select all"/"Deselect all" — to hide just those for visitors of that specific link. "Upload from device" can't be deselected and is always available.

This is per-link by default: other links keep showing the full menu unless configured otherwise. An admin can additionally set instance-wide defaults and restrictions — see Admin settings below.

2. Quick-upload button. Every public folder share with upload permission gets an "Upload files" button right next to "Public share" in the toolbar, so visitors don't need to open the "New" menu just to upload a file. Shown at every screen width, phone to desktop. Upload-only links (file requests) keep Nextcloud's own upload page.

Requirements

• Nextcloud 34 or 35.
• PHP as required by your Nextcloud version.

Installation

From the app store: on the Apps page, open the category Files and click Download and enable for Public Share Control, or with occ:

sudo -u www-data php /path/to/nextcloud/occ app:install public_share_control

Updates then show up on the Apps page as for any other app.

By hand: download public_share_control-<version>.tar.gz from the releases page, extract it into your apps directory (apps/ or your custom apps path), make it belong to the user your web server runs as, then enable it on the Apps page or with occ:

tar -xzf public_share_control-<version>.tar.gz -C /path/to/nextcloud/apps/
chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/nextcloud/apps/public_share_control
sudo -u www-data php /path/to/nextcloud/occ app:enable public_share_control

The commands in this README use www-data, the web server user on Debian and Ubuntu. Other systems use another one, e.g. apache (Fedora, RHEL), http (Arch) or wwwrun (openSUSE); in Docker, run occ with docker exec -u www-data <container> php occ ….

To update an installation by hand, replace the public_share_control folder with the new one the same way, then run occ upgrade (or open the admin page, which offers the update).

The package ships pre-built JS/CSS. A clone of this repository doesn't, see Building from source.

Uninstalling

Disable or remove the app as usual (on the Apps page, or with occ app:disable / occ app:remove public_share_control). Public links behave like plain Nextcloud again right away: the full "New" menu and no extra "Upload files" button.

What stays behind has no effect:

• Links whose owner changed the "New" menu selection keep it as a small share attribute. Without the app nothing reads it; it goes away when the link is deleted, and new links never get it. If you install the app again, these selections apply again.

• The admin settings and the list of "New" menu entries found in the Files app stay in the app config, so a reinstall keeps them too. To delete them:

  sudo -u www-data php /path/to/nextcloud/occ config:app:delete public_share_control default-hidden-entries
  sudo -u www-data php /path/to/nextcloud/occ config:app:delete public_share_control forbidden-entries
  sudo -u www-data php /path/to/nextcloud/occ config:app:delete public_share_control quick-upload-enabled
  sudo -u www-data php /path/to/nextcloud/occ config:app:delete public_share_control discovered-entries

Usage

1. Share a folder as usual: Share → Create link, with permission "Allow upload and editing" (not "File request" — that mode doesn't show visitors a file list or a "New" menu in the first place).
2. Open the link's details (where password, expiration, "Hide download" etc. also live) and expand Advanced settings. A Restrict "New" menu option appears there with a button listing each entry — checked by default, unless an admin configured instance-wide defaults (see below). Uncheck what you don't want visitors to create, then click the sidebar's own "Update share" button to save — same button as every other sharing setting, no separate save action.
3. Visitors of that link now see every "New" menu entry except the ones you unchecked (plus anything an admin forbade instance-wide, which is always hidden and can't be re-enabled per link). "Upload from device" is unaffected.
4. The "Upload files" button next to "Public share" needs no setup — it appears automatically on every folder share that allows uploads (except upload-only file requests), unless an admin turned it off instance-wide.

Admin settings

An admin can go to Administration settings → Sharing → Public Share Control to set, instance-wide:

• Hidden by default: entries that start out unchecked for any share whose owner hasn't made their own explicit choice yet. The owner can still turn any of them back on for a specific link — this only changes the starting point, not a hard restriction. A share the owner already explicitly configured (even just clicking "Update share" once with everything checked) is unaffected by later changes to this list.
• Forbidden: entries that are always hidden, everywhere, with no owner override — shown as disabled checkboxes in the sidebar dropdown. Applies immediately to every existing link as well.
• Whether the quick-upload button appears at all (on by default).

The page lists every entry of the "New" menu. Entries created from templates (documents, spreadsheets, diagrams, whiteboards, …) come from the server; all others — "New folder", the Text app's "Add folder description", OnlyOffice's "New PDF form" and whatever other apps add — appear once an administrator has opened the Files app, where the app notes which entries are registered.

Entries of apps installed later show up the same way, and are visible everywhere until an owner or admin hides them: all lists are "what to hide" lists.

Good to know

• This hides UI, it doesn't change permissions. The share still has the "create" capability under the hood (uploads wouldn't work otherwise — Nextcloud has no separate permission for "upload a file" vs. "create a folder/document"). A technically inclined visitor could still create a folder via WebDAV directly. Treat this the same way you'd treat Nextcloud's own built-in "Hide download" toggle: a UI-level nudge for normal use, not a hard security boundary.
• The dropdown only appears on folder shares — file shares and non-link shares never had a "New" menu to control.
• Public links (/s/…) aren't intercepted by the official Nextcloud Android/iOS apps, so visitors always land in their normal mobile browser — both features work there exactly as on desktop.
• Two core entries that can never apply to an anonymous visitor ("Create file request", "Create templates folder" — both tied to a logged-in account) are filtered out of the dropdown automatically.

Building from source

npm ci
npm run build
scripts/package.sh   # → build/artifacts/public_share_control-<version>.tar.gz

Requires Node 24 (see engines in package.json); npm run lint needs at least Node 22.14.

Releasing (maintainers)

• While developing: commit and push as usual, and add every change users will notice to CHANGELOG.md under ## [Unreleased]. Pushes to main only run CI — nothing is released.

• Release candidate, to test a version on a real instance first:

  scripts/bump-version.sh 1.1.0-rc.1
  git commit -am "Release 1.1.0-rc.1" && git push   # wait for CI to pass
  git tag -a v1.1.0-rc.1 -m "Public Share Control 1.1.0-rc.1" && git push origin v1.1.0-rc.1

  Install the package from the pre-release on GitHub and test it. Another round is -rc.2, -rc.3, …

• Final release:

  scripts/bump-version.sh 1.1.0
  git commit -am "Release 1.1.0" && git push           # wait for CI to pass
  git tag -a v1.1.0 -m "Public Share Control 1.1.0" && git push origin v1.1.0

• Pushing the tag runs all checks, then publishes a GitHub release with the package attached. Its notes come from CHANGELOG.md: the version's section, or ## [Unreleased] for a pre-release. The tag message is only stored with the tag.

• Only final releases go to the Nextcloud app store, signed and uploaded automatically. Pre-releases stay on GitHub, unsigned.

Details, e.g. which versions bump-version.sh accepts: "Releasing" in AGENTS.md.

Support

Issues: https://github.com/nicostoe/public_share_control/issues

Security vulnerabilities: please report them privately, see SECURITY.md.

License

AGPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE.