ZFile on Ubuntu 24.04

ZFile is a self hosted web file listing and sharing server. Point it at your storage and it presents one clean, fast web interface for browsing, previewing and sharing what is there: images, audio and video, text and Markdown, PDF and Office documents all render directly in the browser, and any file or folder can be handed to someone else as a share link or a direct link.

One interface over many storage backends. Alongside the local disk source that is already configured on first boot, ZFile mounts more than ten storage types into the same browsing experience: Amazon S3 and S3 compatible object stores, OneDrive and SharePoint, Google Drive, WebDAV, FTP and SFTP among them. Each source is added in the admin area in a few fields, and several sources can be presented side by side.

Built from the open MIT source, verifiably. The upstream release binaries are a closed packaging, so this image does not use them: both the Spring Boot backend and the Vue frontend are compiled from the MIT licensed source repositories at the tagged 4.5.0 release, and the MIT licence text ships in the image with a provenance note. The build toolchain is removed before capture. The vendor's separate commercial Pro edition is not included and nothing from it is pulled.

Secure by default. No default credential ships in the image: the administrator account does not exist until your VM's first boot creates it with a password generated uniquely for that machine and written to a root only file. The application itself listens only on the loopback interface behind an nginx reverse proxy, the only public listener, and the public surface stays closed until first boot initialisation has completed. A freshly deployed VM shows files only to the signed in administrator; anonymous browsing stays off until you deliberately enable it per storage source.

Verified end to end before release. The build is not finished until a real file has made the complete journey on a fresh VM booted from the published image: signed in with the first boot password, uploaded through the web API, landed byte identical on the dedicated 32 GiB data disk, shared by link and downloaded back through that link with the bytes compared. Uploads stream through nginx with no artificial size cap.

ZFile is distributed under the MIT licence, free and open source with no per user fee. ZFile is the work of the zfile-dev project; cloudimg is not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by the project, and names it only to identify the software included. cloudimg provides packaging, the secure by default configuration, per instance credential automation, security patching, and 24/7 support with a guaranteed 24 hour response SLA.