Filestash with local storage

On Linux machines, I’ve been mounting remote directories over ssh for decades, typing ssh://host/dir in gnome’s file manager or fish://host/dir in Konqueror/Dolphin or using the Midnight Commander when those were not available. But when someone in your household uses a Mac, it’s not that easy. There is macFUSE, but it’s a pain to set up and maintain on a machine not under your control and any update can have you reconfigure everything again. I’ve even been running an NFS server in the past, but that too stopped working on MacOS long ago. I’ve used Nextcloud’s ssh mounting too, but I stopped that for security reasons.

To fix this, I’ve recently reinstalled Filestash, an “Open Source Platform for File Sharing / Document Management / MFT / Archiving”. Filestash is fast and looks good doing it, but setting it up can be a tad tricky, making some use sFTP where the Local plugin could be used instead.

That YAML file contained much I didn’t need, so this is what I kept:

After creating the directory for the app data state on the host, I ran the container, and opened host:8334/admin in my browser. After setting up an admin password, I found myself in Filestash’s admin console.

thefoggiest.dev/content/img/filestash-amin-console.jpg Filestash Admin console

Clicking Local under Storage Backend selects the Local storage plugin. Under Authentication Middleware I chose Local as well, having Filestash take care of authentication. A link to admin/simple-user-management appeared, which allowed me to create the needed accounts.

Scrolling down, there was a section called Attribute mapping:

thefoggiest.dev/content/img/filestash-attribute-mapping.jpg Attribute mapping for Local storage

This is where, together with my admin password, I could enter the volume where I had the container mount the data I wanted to make available, /mnt.

And that was all. Filestash can do much more, so I feel like I’m heavily underusing it, but that’s okay. Anyone inside my network opening port 8334 on that host who can log in, can easily browse through the files, view them and upload new ones. It shows pictures in a gallery and also shows video.

It’s fast too, and much, much easier than setting up macFUSE.