This guide will help you set up your FileBrowser instance alone. This will be helpful for users who just want to access their files over LAN for storage.

Folder Structure

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filebrowser-quantum/
├── .env
├── compose.yaml
└── files/
└── data/
    ├── config.yaml
    └── tmp/

Initial Setup

  • Run the commands below commands in the terminal to initialize the folder structure, or manually via the desktop.
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mkdir -p data/tmp
touch .env compose.yaml data/config.yaml

Volume bindings needed:

  • ./data:/home/filebrowser/data is required to set the config file, database and tmp folder.
  • Any folder you want to have access to. In this example, we use ./files which will be created in the same directory
  • Other volume bindings that need to have access via the web.

Update the compose.yml,

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services:
  filebrowser:
    image: gtstef/filebrowser:stable
    container_name: quantum-prod
    ports:
      - 8900:80
    restart: unless-stopped
    # user: filebrowser
    networks:
      - proxy
    volumes:
      - ./data:/home/filebrowser/data
      - ./files:/files
      # - /other/dir:/dir # Add other sources
    environment:
      - "FILEBROWSER_CONFIG=data/config.yaml" # using our config file at ./data/config.yaml

Update the config.yaml,

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server:
  database: "data/database.db"
  cacheDir: "data/tmp"
  sources:
    - path: "/files"
      name: Home
      config:
        defaultUserScope: "/users/" # new users will get created in /users/<username>
        defaultEnabled: true # new users automatically get access to the source
        createUserDir: true # a user "bill" will see files from /files/users/bill
    - path: "/home/filebrowser" # mount the docker home folder for convenience
      name: Backend
    # Add your sources here.
  #externalUrl: 'https://<YOUR_IP>:8900' # if you plan to share externally, share links will be generated with this url
  maxArchiveSize: 50 # maxiumum pre-archive size users are allowed to download at once.
auth:
  tokenExpirationHours: 2
  methods:
    password:
      enabled: true
      minLength: 5
      signup: true
  adminUsername: admin
  adminPassword: admin # remove this after first startup if you want to change this password manually.

Non Root user

By default, FileBrowser uses root. You can use filebrowser, a built-in user (with UID=1000 and GID=1000), but specifying in the compose file’s user in the respective service. If you need a different ID, then create a .env file and fill the contents with,

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UID=1001
GID=1001 # or your required values

This way compose file will take the variables’ value when docker compose starts FileBrowser.

Update the compose file with user: "$UID:$GID" instead. Lastly, update the data folder owner with the same ID as well with

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chown -R 1001:1001 data

For most cases, user: filebrowser will suffice.

Using FileBrowser

Starting the service

Change to the directory where the compose file is in your terminal and run,

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docker compose up -d

This will pull the image and start the container. You can now access it via http://<YOUR_IP>:8900.

Updating the service

Change to the directory where the compose file is in your terminal and run,

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docker compose pull   # Get the new image
docker compose down   # Shutdown container
docker compose up -d  # Load new image

With the database and cache set up, your data will persist even with restarts.

Next Steps