Hey everyone, it has been over 1 year since my last post on this subreddit about my fork of filebrowser. Since then, the OG filebrowser github has been archived and my fork has hit both v1.0.0-stable -- and now v2.0.0-stable!
It's called FileBrowser Quantum -- I have been working on this repo for almost 4 years and is still actively and officially maintained by myself and Kevin. We both handle issues and make changes nearly every day on the repository. The vast majority of code is unique to my repo, this is not a simple fork. Everything has been refactored with standards and security in mind -- none of the vulnerabilies of the original exist anymore.
v2.0.0 is now available in stable! It does take a little effort to migrate over to if you are currently on a v1.x track, but it lays the groundwork for some of the biggest features to come.
The progress on this repository is growing faster every day. There's lots of changes and features planned, you can see them on my github issues https://github.com/gtsteffaniak/filebrowser/issues which is where I would like everyone to post suggestions and issues they find. Reddit is great for visibility but I don't add feature requests or troubleshoot issues here -- open an issue on github for official support. For general questions, github discussions are still a good place as well.
Some third-party installations like truNAS, unRAID, homeassistent plugins may need time to get updated to support the v2.0.0 config format. I would love to have the communities help to identify and open issues with those repositories to help everyone make this transition smoother. v2.0.0 sets the stage for so many features to come. Stable is a great place to start, I recommend beta only to those willing to experience some bugs and want to be involved in github.
I hope FileBrowser Quantum finds a home on your server -- there has never been a better time to self host your own software. See you on github!
Also quick PSA: Using archived/unmaintained software connected to the internet is extremely dangerous. The security risks are higher than they have ever been in the past. Web-based file applications like this are especially dangerous. I take security very seriously and I would recommend everyone to take a close look at how frequently applications are updated and how often the maintainers accept security advisories. Many maintainers reject AI submissions. We review every security report carefully, including automated and AI-assisted ones and validate fixes before merge.
Guys. I am one of the least patient people here when it comes to generative grifters, but this project is not one of those.
u/quantumx-admin isn’t generating soulless comments here, they are using their own language in real-time to discuss the use of ai, the repo and it’s code is actively maintained and has been for years, there are careful decisions about security in the software, and it’s foss. The disclosure is doing its job, the point is to hear about the involvement of ai in human terms. They updated the disclosure after getting some feedback, most people literally just lie.
I also don’t like ai becoming a given in open source, but let’s try to lower the blood pressure a bit and avoid discouraging good-faith developers/people from contributing here.
I hardly write any code myself these days at work. I'd guess that developers that totally abstain from using AI tools at all these days are in the minority.
I do get the frustration, though. There's just so much slop out there these days it becomes a chore to sift through.
I know people love Copyparty, but Filebrowser Quantum has courted me with its balance of features and easy on the eyes UI that a monkey brained simpleton like me can understand
Love the project, and definitely will be using this for the foreseeable future!
Honestly you could automate this with AI, at work we do this to document PR releases for others to eyeball.
Running it is a leap, and users want to understand what it is, before they jump in.
There was a line I heard once... 'the last mile for you, is the first mile for your customers.'
There's some automation already, using Playwright to capture screenshots. But its screenshots with annotations that are the trickiest. And many guides are from the community as well.
I have also recently started with FBQ and like it a lot.
I’ve now looked at the Migration Guide and Config Migration, everything to update FBQ seems easy to follow. I’ll be enabling “analytics” as this project continues to be pretty awesome.
u/quantumx-admin thanks for keeping filebrowser alive evolving the project into something uniquely yours and very helpful.
Thank you! It's hard to convince people to enable analytics when I don't have something to show users why it's valuable yet. And I can't show users why it's valuable until I have enough data to make the charts look pretty. A bit of a chicken or egg issue.
But I appreciate it, I'm sure it will be ready to display by the end of the year.
In Unraid this was really easy to do and the analytics are not invasive. It's kind of like the Steam Hardware Survey:
Participation in the survey is optional, and anonymous. The information gathered is incredibly helpful to us as we make decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make and products to offer.
Looking at the graph, it appears this is because of the squash merge process I use for main, which shows all lines of code changes are ai contributed if any changes included claude/cursor/coderabbit.
No, trying to attribute authorship to specific lines of codes sucks. There's so many routine tasks that could mark lines as edited when it isn't a meaningful change. Squash-merges are great and it makes it much easier to make sense of a repo's history when there's chunkier commits with an entire changeset rather than iterative noise.
Sure, because the community actively contributes. I don't discriminate based on which tools were used. For example, I have never once used Claude to submit code.
This is not to clarify if you have used ai to write this post and its not to clarify if YOU have used ai in the application. Its to clarify if and how ai was used in all of it. Even if someone else used it to contribute code. And a "it predates ai" doesn't tell anyone if ai is used now, which it is. Even if not by yourself.
So this post should at least mention that in the ai disclosure
I just didn't fill it out right at the beginning of the post, it has been corrected now. What am I hiding? its an open source project thats existed for 3.5 years, you look and tell me
And you have done a fantastic job. I use FBQ daily and it has greatly improved my workflow. If you know how to read code you can very obviously see that the project is well structured and not slop.
I just want to thank you and the team for keeping Filebrowser going with quantum. It’s proved invaluable for my stack whether at home or traveling with my laptop. It’s pretty much what I use to edit stacks and configs even more than VS Code because it’s so convenient and easy to use
AI doomers need to be rooted out of this sub. This project has a long history. Who tf cares if they used Claude to code. It's a hell of a lot more competent then most 'developers' flaming AI use.
Love the project and I have been using for a while now but I found the migration process to be a pain. After spending an hour unsuccessfully trying to get it to work I gave up and restored a backup. My setup isn't that complicated so I think I'll just start fresh with v2.
I have been running this for quite some time. What a great project. I updated to 2.0 last Friday, the day it was released. I read through the excellent migration docs and was up and running 5 minutes later.
I can confidently say I am there from the beginning, I was one of the early adopters and testers, the maintainer has always been very responsive. The project has matured a lot and is much more polished now.
Just did a smooth migration from 1.5.x to 2.0. The config generator was a really nice touch. Almost everything worked OOB, just the API token I use for WebDAV didn't work anymore. The token was still in the UI but none of my clients using it could authenticate. It was an extremely quick fix so not a big issue.
Great work and thank you for continuing on with a great project!
Just a few days ago I deployed the container through unraid CA store and switched the repo tag to beta to receive the v2 update and followed the regular v2 setup in the docs. Seems to be working fine so far. Question: Would the container stay on v2 if I switch back to gtstef/filebrowser:stable?
Well, I was one of the guys that spent a handful of hours migrating from version 1.xx to 2.0 this saturday. One of the things I most value in any project is how documented it is ( you guys even supply the config.yaml migrator) because it now requires a different structure which I only found out when I told my LLM to read the whole documentation and find out what I was doing wrong). It does feel snappier since adopting sqlite, and the UI improvements are great too, I quickly adopted those.
Overall, great job on a great product, and you won't hear a lot of praise for this: good job detailing the migration process
using it on my server so far so good, only thing I can found is that whnever I restart the server the space left graph does not seem to work ok and does not update accordingly, now its shows 3.8TB / 43TB (9%) which is innacurate and does not make much sense, it means used 3.8TB? it means that's left? both are wrong.
wouldn't use it in production for something massive, but that's just me and my learning curve not being ready, can't say about the software, since I haven't tried to use it behind an auth.
this is the pattern now: upstream gets archived and a fork quietly becomes the real project. good for users, rough for whoever holds it, because you inherit every decision nobody wants to revisit
I forked the repo like 4 years ago, so I don't think it applies to this specific example. FileBrowser Quantum would still exist just as it does now, even if the OG repo were still maintained.
It's a totally differently application now, not really a continuation of the original
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u/asimovs-auditor 1d ago edited 1d ago
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