tylerperkins.xyz/content/posts/filebrowser-sidecar/filebrowser-sidecar.md

title	date	draft
Filebrowser Sidecar	2023-12-18T19:02:43-05:00	false

So last time I talked about my home k3s cluster. I still have been non stop tinkering with the thing, and its a blast. I really enjoy tinkering with it, hosting my own apps for myself and my friends/family, and just getting to learn more about the high availability hosting stuff.

With that said, there are definitely growing pains compared to just a straight docker setup. With more moving parts, theres only more stuff to break, and it breaks kinda often. Part of it is me not knowing the best practices, and trying to pick it up as I go. And another large part is the older hardware I use. However the greatest pain is storage.

I use longhorn for sharded storage in the cluster, each machine has 2TB of memory to contribute, which for a small database and some config files is more than enough. However, what do I do when I want to edit some files in a volume directly? Or just look at them to satiate my own curiosity?

So my journey began with using filebrowser as a simple sidecar, which worked for quickly testing stuff. But I wanted something a bit more permament, and something that did not default to very insure credentials. It also needed to not rely on some local files for credentials, I didn't want to make a whole pvc volume just for a sqlite database of a few kilobytes.

My response to all of this is a custom filebrowser extension! This container uses environment variables to configure the container every time it is built, so that you don't need any configuration! This solves all the issues I had with it prior, and makes it a much more friendly solution for my personal usecase.

I have more instructions at the actual git repository linked above, but I'll include some of the environment variables that can be configured below incase you are curious.

Variable	Description	Default
ADMIN_PASS	admin user password	admin
DEFAULT_USERNAME	The username for the newly created user	default
DEFAULT_PASSWORD	The password for the newly created user	default
BRANDING_NAME	Name shown on the home screen	My file storage
AUTH_METHOD	What auth method should be used?	json
AUTH_HEADER	What header should be used for proxy authentication?	X-My-Header
PERM_ADMIN	Allow user admin privileges	false
PERM_EXECUTE	Allow user to execute commands	false
PERM_CREATE	Allow user to create files and directories	false
PERM_RENAME	Allow user to rename files and directories	false
PERM_MODIFY	Allow user to modify files	false
PERM_DELETE	Allow user to delete files	false
PERM_SHARE	Allow user to share files and directories	false
PERM_DOWNLOAD	Allow user to download files	false

If you have any feature requests or issues with it, feel free to open an issue either on gitea or github.