Enhance Your TrueNAS Scale Storage With This Web-Based File Manager App

foreign [Music] systems and we're going to talk about true Nas scale and a web-based file manager called file browser this solves a couple problems one transferring files over SMB over any High latency connection like a VPN can be a little bit slow I've got a video where I dive into some of the details of that second some people have asked for a file browser to be able to manipulate files via a web interface on true Nas and this solves that problem this was not available when I did my video on VPN and file shares so unfortunately it wasn't a solution I could just point at an offer at the time but hey I'm really glad that application exists here today now a couple things that are going to be out of scope in this video is one setting up the permissions because I have a separate video that dives into how to set up application permissions which I happen to have demoed the same software with to get it set up so pretty easy to follow all the app permissions for setup we're going to focus on just setting up the tool and how it works which is pretty slick and second I'm not going to cover reverse proxy but I will leave you with a little bit of a warning before you expose this or really any file sharing service to the internet please make sure you understand the risks that are associated with it I always make sure things are behind the VPN unless absolutely some reason not to put them behind a VPN because there's always some risk that a project may have a flaw and the data that you wanted to share with maybe a select individual or small group of people could be exposed to everyone whether by accident or flaw found in the system so always really consider the risk but yes this can be paired with the reverse proxy something like a cloudflare tunnel or a reverse proxy like ha proxy or any other number of reverse proxy projects nonetheless that's all I have to say in part of warning let's go ahead and get started with this tutorial on how to set this up all right we're running the latest version of tuna scale 22.12.3.2 and we're going to go over here to our data sets I have a app config data set and then nested underneath the file browser data set for each different app that needs to have some configuration storage as in the configuration of the app itself I like to create a sub data set under my app config so I know that this is where that data is stored in case I'd like to back it up or restore any version of the app if you don't set this up and you put several users for example in file browser and you have to reset it well you'll have to reset up those users so this is just a preference I have to make it simpler in case I have to reinstall or roll back to a previous version because you can snapshot any individual data set once you have it all set up or back it up now we're going to go over here to the apps but before we do we will point out we have share demo and share demo 2 I have one extra NASA data set here these are the ones we're going to use for the demo they've already been created so let's go over here to our apps available applications type the word file and the current version is 2.320106 go ahead and click install application name file browser that's fine version we'll just go ahead and install the latest version it doesn't have any previous ones environment variables we're not going to change any of those user ID that's fine web Port optional if you want certificate we're just going to go ahead and use the freenas default certificate you can choose if you have more certificate they may be in the list here but if you're going to use a reverse proxy whichever assert you want to use then it'll be passed on to the reverse proxy just something to consider there on whether or not you'll run to any problems with it having a self-signed cert or if you want to start on there and now we get to the file browser config storage host path this is what I'm going to choose instead of the IX systems default Mount epoch configs file browser this is where it's going to store that configuration for the file browser right there next is how do we want to present the data well we're going to call it share demo and that is just because I have it called share demo for the mount but you can call it whichever you want these don't have to match but for sanity I think they should match so your Mount path is Mount apoc share demo what it will show inside of file browser is share demo and it does require that slash there there was just scroll down the bottom and hit save and let it deploy the application once the app is deployed we're going to click on web portal and we'll put in a username and password which is going to be admin admin and there's our folder we can double click share demo I already have some data in there so I can look at each one of these click on one of these images great I can view images I can click on one if I would like to download the image it will kick off a download so the system is working perfectly fine let's go into settings though because admin admin is a terrible idea to leave it there so let's go ahead and fix that and we can change it if we want or instead I would actually recommend creating another user so you could leave blank to avoid changes but we actually want to go to user management and create a new user user Tom leave everything else the same we'll make Tom and administrator as well and we're just going to go ahead and hit save then from there I want to log out then we go back over to settings user management now it doesn't have that I found in a way to delete the admin but you can still change the admin password make it really long or even take away the admin privileges for this particular user that way that's one less thing for people to guess kind of a security step here go down admin can't do anything hit save user updated so it's got a new password and it's not able to do anything with someone where to figure out that password so now admins defunct and Tom is the admin and you can start creating more users over here I will say let's go ahead and switch it to dark mode and we'll update settings updated now it looks a little better in dark mode now before we go any further let's go ahead and reconfigure something because we have two shares and those shares our share demo and share demo too so let's go ahead and look at share demo 2 so we have some files in there as well but let's get both of them in here so we're going to do that is we're going to go back over to True net scale click on edit because you want to edit this instance we don't have to stop it it'll automatically restart when we make the config changes and here's our share demo and we want to add another one we want to add it as a host path the mount path and put a 2 after that because it's going to go here and share demo too so we've got the share demo one shared m02 and when we click save it's going to go through and reset the settings now it's not going to lose the users or configurations that I have in there it's just going to reset and add this second share in there and it's going to relaunch this file browser tool all right it's active again so we're going to go to back to web portal and now we have share demo and share demo too now what I did here was put a bunch of random small files in here to show you that it will handle oh I think I have about 15 000 or so files in here they pull up pretty easy and want to compare that to when we do the random small files on a share so this is that same share demo too and it pauses a little bit just to pull this up over SMB this is over a VPN but it's a rather fast VPN so it didn't pause as much but mileage may vary if you have a more High latency connection where this would pause even more because SMB really doesn't handle latency very well but of course when you're doing it through a web browser it's a whole lot easier to to do because that has no problem working over those connections now let's talk about how this system works and how we can upload or download files and let's go ahead and upload something to here so we'll click on this with the upload button we can actually grab an entire folder or grab an individual file and I got a couple of voicemails and I'll hold down and grab two of them hit open and I can now upload those voicemails right to here what if I wanted to download again along with all these other pictures I'm just holding the control key to select individual files or you can hold shift and grab the first file and grab them all so let me go ahead and do that so if we do shift over to here that'll grab them all they've also got a little check box at the top here to select multiple and then we can click to download them as a zip atar a tar gz I think this is nice because now I can grab these zip them and then grab them as a normal download and then even go back because I went to the downloads folder go to file downloads there's that file and we can actually just send it right back up to the system and there it is now as far as how that shows up on our shares it's one and the same so we can look at it we can see that it added these particular files to the shares it's a really easy utility to use and there's still one more feature what if we wanted to share this externally but not have someone have a login this is where if you're using this over reverse proxy you want to share something out on a public internet it has an option for that you can set the shared duration to let's say you have two hours or seconds minutes days however you'd like but we'll leave it at hours optional password and then we can Click Share and then we can go ahead and click copy to that link and we can even create more shares and go on from there now to see the shares we're going to close this one we're going to go here settings share management and you can see the shares now when it did this and we can recopy it to the clipboard and we can show you the Share it creates I did have this set up with a certificate using the cert that's for truenast the port number share and it just adds a random file now of course if you have a reverse proxy this would be with whatever the fully qualified domain you have at the end of it but that's all you have to do to get this working https and that and now you can share this document until it goes away or until we do this we delete it before the time expires and it leaves this little message of it feels lonely here now if we come over here to the global settings there are a few more things that you can do such as running very specific commands setting scope they have this all listed out in their documentation including different authentication managements custom branding and other command line interface options you can do special commands and configurations as always leave your thoughts and comments down below head over my forums for a more in-depth discussion on this or other topics and like And subscribe if you want to see more content from this Channel or reach out to us at launchssystems.com if you'd like to hire us for some Consulting around sure dancing other things we talk about on this channel and thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 64,339

Keywords: LawrenceSystems, TrueNAS Scale, truenas scale setup, truenas scale, truenas setup, truenas scale docker, truenas scale apps, true nas, file system, open soure, network attached storage, freenas setup, home lab, open-source application, file server, nas build, truenas file manager, web file manager, web file manager open source, web file manager docker, web file manager github, file browser

Id: XCouS6Zw5vA

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2023