filex — self-hosted file manager

A browser client for your users

Give someone a user or viewer account and the address …/drive, and they land on their own Home — their storages, what they opened last, what they starred — one click from the file manager itself, with its uploads, sharing, search and editor, and with no admin panel around it and no separate frontend to deploy. …/admin is the operator's door to the same application, and it opens on the same Home.

Roles and access

🖥️

Desktop app

The same explorer in its own window on Windows, Linux and macOS — several accounts at once, right-click a folder or file to keep it on the computer, sync that keeps running when the window is closed, and double-click an Office document on your own disk to edit it without Office installed. Not allowed to install software? Every platform also has a copy that runs from wherever you put it, and the Windows portable one keeps all its files in one folder beside the .exe.

Desktop docs

🪄

Drag files out, copy between storages

Drag a selection onto your desktop and it lands as separate real files and folders, not an archive. Copy or cut in one storage and paste in another — filex streams the tree between the two backends, keeps every timestamp, and only removes the original once the copy is verified.

How dragging out works

🔁

Folder sync

A folder on your PC kept in step with a folder on the server, both ways — from the desktop menu or the CLI. The first sync deletes nothing and a delete never beats an edit.

Sync docs

🔍

Search that forgives

Find files by name or by what is inside them, across every mounted storage. "invoice 2026" finds invoice_2026.pdf, "mian.go" finds main.go, and tag:source narrows to what you tagged — with exact matches always ranked first.

Search docs

🔌

Speaks your tools' protocols

Point rclone, restic, aws s3, WinSCP, FileZilla, a scanner that only learned FTP or a media player that only learned NFS straight at filex — S3, SFTP, FTPS, NFS and WebDAV, all on the same tree with the same permissions and trash as the web UI.

Protocol docs

🧩

Teach it a new storage

A backend filex has never heard of is a separate program you install from the admin panel — it describes its own config form, and its driver then behaves like any built-in one. Any language; a Go SDK makes it three methods. Every capability it claims is probed before anyone can build a storage on it.

Plugin docs

📊

What your storage costs

filex does not meter your provider's bill — it reads the report the provider already writes and prices it with a table you can edit. Backblaze B2's daily report is read over the same S3 API filex already speaks, and the free allowances are shown beside the billable lines, because "your downloads were free this month" is usually the thing worth knowing.

Usage & cost docs

🖼️

Thumbnails you can read

A PDF shows its first page, top-anchored so the title is in the card; a video its first frame that is not black, because a fade-in used to produce a black square; an Office document its rendered first page; and a text, code or CSV file its own first lines instead of repeating the extension the row already prints. A server missing ffmpeg, ghostscript or libreoffice says so in its log at boot rather than quietly drawing coloured rectangles.

Thumbnail docs

💾

Mount it as a drive

filex mount attaches a remote server over ordinary HTTPS — a folder on Linux, a drive letter on Windows. Not a sync — it opens one file out of a hundred thousand without downloading the rest.

How to mount

🌐

WebDAV

Mount your drives in Finder, Explorer or davfs2 — every storage served over one WebDAV endpoint.

WebDAV docs

⌨️

CLI

The same binary doubles as a remote client — script uploads, downloads and syncs over the public REST API.

CLI docs

🧭

Navigation people already know

A left panel led by one "+ New" menu — upload files, a new folder, a new document, a file request; the destinations Home, My files, Shared with me, Recent, Starred and Trash; your tags, each one opening the files carrying it; and the storages you can reach — a storage somebody granted you simply appears there, one click, no mount instructions. It is also where "How to connect" and your own API keys live, so an embedded copy of the explorer can hand a user the credential WebDAV or FTPS asks for — unless the embed is proxied with one shared app token, in which case the surfaces that belong to a single person are left out. Collapse it to an icon rail from the top bar when you want the width back. Everything around it is one shell, drawn by every embed with no string passed — one search field in the header with its palette shortcut, a Type/People/Modified/Size filter row, Folders and Files as sections, and Details/Activity in the info panel — and uiProfile 'simple' reduces it for people who want a file drive rather than a file manager.

Turning it on

🧩

Embeddable UI

Drop the explorer into any app as a Vue 3 or React component, or a framework-free web component.

Integration docs

🤖

MCP for AI agents

A token-authenticated automation surface that speaks Model Context Protocol — let agents browse, read and write files, and hand them credential-free upload tickets for files too big to pass through a model.

MCP docs

🛡️

RBAC

Roles plus per-file and per-folder permissions with inheritance — enforced in the backend, off by default.

RBAC docs

🔐

End-to-end encrypted folders

Encrypted in the browser with WebCrypto: the server stores ciphertext and never receives a key. Each folder gets a recovery key, shown once, so a forgotten password is not automatically lost data — and an operator can optionally hold an escrow key, with the limits stated rather than implied.

How it works

🏢

LDAP / Active Directory

Directory accounts sign in on the same password form as local ones — and on WebDAV, SFTP, FTPS, S3 and NFS too. Private CA supported; local login stays first, so your break-glass account works while the directory is down.

LDAP docs

⚡

Live updates and presence

An open explorer is told what changed over a WebSocket instead of polling for it, and shows who else is in the folder and what they are looking at. One write appears the moment it lands; a burst — a zip extraction, a folder upload, an NFS client writing chunk after chunk — is merged into one frame per window, so five thousand files arriving at once cost the page a bounded trickle rather than five thousand redraws.

Realtime docs

🔔

Webhooks

Any number of webhook targets, each with its own signing secret and its own list of events, plus a persistent in-app bell — all filled from the same single call. A file that arrived and a file somebody replaced are different events, and an infected upload, a failed one or an encrypted folder opened with its recovery key can each be subscribed to on their own.

Notifications docs

🦠

Antivirus

Optional ClamAV scanning on every write, including the built-in editor and files the storage sync discovers — through a local binary or a clamd container over the network — with quarantine, retention windows and infected-file events.

Protection docs

filexSelf-hosted file manager