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Contributing

If you’re interested in contributing to this project, this is the best place to start. Before contributing to this project, please take a bit of time to read our Code of Conduct. Also, note that this project is open-source and licensed under Apache License 2.0.

Project Structure

The backend side of the application is written in Go, while the frontend (located on a subdirectory of the same name) is written in Vue.js. Due to the tight coupling required by some features, basic knowledge of both Go and Vue.js is recommended.

We encourage you to use git to manage your fork. To clone the main repository, just run:

git clone https://github.com/filebrowser/filebrowser

We use Taskfile to manage the different processes (building, releasing, etc) automatically.

Build

You can fully build the project in order to produce a binary by running:

task build

Development

For development, there are a few things to have in mind.

Frontend

We use Node.js on the frontend to manage the build process. Prepare the frontend environment:

# From the root of the repo, go to frontend/
cd frontend

# Install the dependencies
pnpm install

If you just want to develop the backend, you can create a static build of the frontend:

pnpm run build

If you want to develop the frontend, start a development server which watches for changes:

pnpm run dev

Please note that you need to access File Browser’s interface through the development server of the frontend.

Backend

First prepare the backend environment by downloading all required dependencies:

go mod download

You can now build or run File Browser as any other Go project:

# Build
go build

# Run
go run .

Documentation

We rely on Docker to abstract all the dependencies required for building the documentation.

To build the documentation to www/public:

task docs

To start a local server on port 8000 to view the built documentation:

task docs:serve

Release

To make a release, just run:

task release

Translations

Translations are managed on Transifex, which is an online website where everyone can contribute and translate strings for our project. It automatically syncs with the main language file (in English) and,, for you to contribute, you just need to:

  1. Go to our Transifex web page: app.transifex.com/file-browser/file-browser
  2. Click on Join the project and pick your language. We’ll accept you as soon as possible. If you’re language is not on the list, please request it via the interface.

Translations are automatically pushed to GitHub via an integration.

Authentication Provider

To build a new authentication provider, you need to implement the Auther interface, whose method will be called on the login page after the user has submitted their login data.

// Auther is the authentication interface.
type Auther interface {
    // Auth is called to authenticate a request.
    Auth(r *http.Request, s *users.Storage, root string) (*users.User, error)
}

After implementing the interface you should:

  1. Add it to auth directory.
  2. Add it to the configuration parser for the CLI.
  3. Add it to the authBackend.Get.

If you need to add more flags, please update the function addConfigFlags.