I discovered Seafile in search for an alternative to OwnCloud which could not manage to sync my large collection of files (100Gb and 80000 files). It took many hours just to discover which files to sync. Luckily I found Seafile, which is one of the best open-source file syncing solutions out there. It’s written in Python/Django and C. It’s fast and does exactly what it needs to.

This is a quick tutorial how to set up an entire cloud file server appliance on Debian Wheezy 7 64bit.

 

Install Seafile

Choose your preferred location to store Seafile:

mkdir /home/orgname

cd /home/orgname

wget 'http://seafile.googlecode.com/files/seafile-server_1.8.3_x86-64.tar.gz'

tar -zxvf seafile-server_1.8.3_x86-64.tar.gz

mkdir installed

mv seafile-server_1.8.3_x86-64.tar.gz installed

cd seafile-server_1.8.3

 

Get all Debian packages and dependencies:

apt-get install mysql-server mysql-client python2.7 python-setuptools python-simplejson python-imaging python-mysqldb python-flup nginx openssl

 

Lets install Seafile with MySQL server as backend. Follow instructions and fill in the appropriate info:

./setup-seafile-mysql.sh

 

Let’s create a startip script that controls all Seafile server apps from one place. Save it as ‘/bin/seafile’.

#! /bin/bash

SEAFILE=/home/orgname/seafile-server-1.8.3

ulimit -n 30000

case "$@" in
  start)
    cd $SEAFILE
    ./seafile.sh start
    ./seahub.sh start-fastcgi
  ;;
  stop)
    cd $SEAFILE
    ./seafile.sh stop
    ./seahub.sh stop
  ;;
  restart)
    cd $SEAFILE
    ./seafile.sh stop
    ./seahub.sh stop
    ./seafile.sh start
    ./seahub.sh start-fastcgi
  ;;
  gc)
    cd $SEAFILE
    ./seafile.sh stop
    ./seahub.sh stop
    cd seafile
    export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=./lib:${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}
    ./bin/seafserv-gc -c ../../ccnet -d ../../seafile-data
  ;;
  *)
  echo "Usage: /bin/seafile {start|stop|restart|gc}" >&2
  exit 1
  ;;
esac

chmod 755 /bin/seafile

 

Edit ‘/home/orgname/seahub_settings.py’ and add e-mail server info. In this case we use a smarthost without authentication (ip based access).

EMAIL_USE_TLS = False
EMAIL_HOST = 'your.smarthost.com' # smpt server
EMAIL_HOST_USER = False           # username and domain
EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = False       # password
EMAIL_PORT = '25'
DEFAULT_FROM_EMAIL = 'yourname@yourdomain.com'
SERVER_EMAIL = 'yourname@yourdomain.com'

 

Now let’s configure Nginx

Edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default as follows:

server {

    listen       80;
    server_name  www.yourname.com;
    rewrite ^/(.*) https://$server_name/$1 permanent;	# force redirect http to https

}

server {

    listen 443;
    ssl on;
    ssl_certificate /etc/nginx/certs/cacert.pem;            # path to your cacert.pem
    ssl_certificate_key /etc/nginx/certs/privkey.pem;       # path to your privkey.pem
    server_name www.yourname.com;

    location / {

        fastcgi_pass    127.0.0.1:8000;
        fastcgi_param   SCRIPT_FILENAME     $document_root$fastcgi_script_name;
        fastcgi_param   PATH_INFO           $fastcgi_script_name;

        fastcgi_param   SERVER_PROTOCOL     $server_protocol;
        fastcgi_param   QUERY_STRING        $query_string;
        fastcgi_param   REQUEST_METHOD      $request_method;
        fastcgi_param   CONTENT_TYPE        $content_type;
        fastcgi_param   CONTENT_LENGTH      $content_length;
        fastcgi_param   SERVER_ADDR         $server_addr;
        fastcgi_param   SERVER_PORT         $server_port;
        fastcgi_param   SERVER_NAME         $server_name;
        fastcgi_param   HTTPS               on;
        fastcgi_param   HTTP_SCHEME         https;

        access_log      /var/log/nginx/seahub.access.log;
        error_log       /var/log/nginx/seahub.error.log;

    }

    location /seafhttp {

        rewrite ^/seafhttp(.*)$ $1 break;
        proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8082;
        client_max_body_size 0;

    }

    location /media {

        root /home/orgname/seafile-server-1.8.3/seahub;

    }

}

 

Create certificate folder:

mkdir /etc/nginx/certs

cd /etc/nginx/certs

 

Create self-signed certificates or use your own at this point:

openssl genrsa -out privkey.pem 2048

openssl req -new -x509 -key privkey.pem -out cacert.pem -days 3652

 

Nginx is set up, start it:

/etc/init.d/nginx start

 

Make changes to Seafile to support https:

Modify this line in ‘/home/orgname/ccnet/ccnet.conf’:

SERVICE_URL = https://www.yourdomain.com

 

Add this line to ‘/home/orgname/seahub_settings.py’:

HTTP_SERVER_ROOT = 'https://www.yourdomain.com/seafhttp'

 

Start Seafile server services:

seafile start

 

This is it, point your browser to https://www.yourdomain.com