Phylum

Phylum is a self-hosted cloud file browser with native clients on all platforms(*), meant as a replacement for Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. It is licensed under GNU Affero GPL 3.0, and is intended to be forever free and non-commercial.

It is in very early stages of testing, so bugs are to be expected. Fair warning: while the backend is quite robust and its data model fairly fixed, don't even think about putting the only copy of any data that you care about.

Features

• Offline-first native clients on all platforms (*)
  • Drag and Drop
  • Keyboard navigation and shortcuts on web and desktop
• Public shares with password protection and expiration
• Users and permissions
• WebDAV-compatible

• Not yet built/tested on MacOS, iOS, and Windows.

Roadmap

In rough order, here are some things that are planned

• Thumbnails and icon view
• Email share notifications
• In-app user management (update display name/avatar)
• Quota
• Links / Shortcuts
• Storage backends like S3, B2, Minio, etc. (partially implemented)
• Auth backends (LDAP, OAuth)
• Groups
• Offline single file sync
• Sync full directory tree metadata
• 2-way folder sync

Deployment / Testing

The easiest way to get up and running is to use docker (or podman) compose go to http://localhost:2448.

Configuration is read from config.yml, if it exists. Any config item can be overridden via environment variables and command-line flags, with '' separating nested keys, and a`'PHYLUM' prefix for env.

See config.defaults.yml to see a list of all configuration options, and example.env for some common overrides.

You must add the first user using the CLI using the admin user invite command. You may add others as well, or invite them directly from inside the app.

Development

Server

The server is written in Go, and requires a postgres server to be running.

$ podman run -it \
    -e POSTGRES_USER=phylum \
    -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=<password> \
    -v ./data/postgres:/var/lib/postgresql/data \
    docker.io/postgres:17

The working directory can be changed by passing in the -W flag, which is useful for local development. The data folder in the repo root is intended to be the working directory for local development, and is ignored by git.

Add your db password to data/config.yml, and run the server:

$ go run -C server cmd/phylum.go -W ../data serve

Client

The client is written using Flutter, and building requires no special configuration as long as your toolchian is set up properly. Of course, you will need a running server to connect to.

It is usually easiest to work on the desktop app, and only test on devices/web if needed for platform-specific integration.

Web

If you want to work on the web client specifically, then the simplest way is to create a link to the web client build folder from the server's working directory.

$ ln -st data ../client/build/web/

Please note that the web client must is built with WASM using flutter build web --wasm

CLI

The CLI is a powerful way to interact with and manager a locally running phylum instance. It also enables some admin use-cases that are not possible using the app or API yet.

Depending on whether you are running the program directly or via compose, you can use either

$ go run -C server cmd/phylum.go -W ../data <cmd>

or

$ podman exec -it phylum_server ./phylum <cmd>

Use the help command (or leave out the command) to get a list of options