(Web) Filemanager
Overview
I’m currently on a lookout for a simple file browser which has a web interface to managing files. This kind of software seems fairly niche and therefore not a lot of supported solutions are out there. It should have the following:
- Upload, download of files
- Thumbnails of pictures (videos would be a bonus)
- Authentication or someway of adding authentication
- Delete files
- Quick browse like slide show or previous / next whilst viewing the file
- Preferably databaseless
I came across Filemanager hosted on github so I thought I’d give it a try.
Install
This assumes Apache Web Server, PHP and PHP-GD is already install with the default configuration.
Download Filemanager from https://github.com/simogeo/Filemanager/archive/master.zip or go to Filemanager and click on the Download ZIP button.
Unzip the download:
unzip master.zip
Rename the folder from the zip file from Filemanager-master to filemanager (Note the lower case of the new name. This will be used as part of the web address) and move it to the Apache web folder:
sudo mv Filemanager-master /var/www/filemanager
Make a copy and rename the default configuration file which will be used by Filemanager:
sudo cp /var/www/filemanager/scripts/filemanager.config.js.default /var/www/filemanager/scripts/filemanager.config.js
Setup And Configuration
The configuration file is located at /var/www/filemanager/scripts/filemanager.config.js any changes unless stated otherwise needs to made in this file.
The file browser starts from ~/filemanager/userfiles so any files or folders should be creating in the userfiles directory.
To change this set serverRoot to false and fileRoot to the path of the folder:
"serverRoot": false,
"fileRoot": "/home/danny/files/",
The folder must have a trailing “/” (slash) at the end. Also make sure the new directory can be seen (and if necessary manipulatable) by the web server i.e www-data user / group or nothing will show up.
I could not get this option working…
Summary
FileManager is a nice simple self hosted solution to manage files on a the server. It has preview thumbnails and support the main types of file formats. There are bugs here and the lack of pace in development does worry me so I will be looking for another alternative solution.
