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Setup With S3 Storage

Prepare

To setup Seafile Professional Server with Amazon S3:

# Version 10.0 or earlier
sudo pip install boto

# Since 11.0 version
sudo pip install boto3
  • Install and configure memcached or Redis. For best performance, Seafile requires enable memory cache for objects. We recommend to at least allocate 128MB memory for memcached or Redis.

The configuration options differ for different S3 storage. We'll describe the configurations in separate sections.

AWS S3

AWS S3 is the original S3 storage provider.

Edit seafile.conf, add the following lines:

[commit_object_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-commit-objects
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
use_v4_signature = true
aws_region = eu-central-1

[fs_object_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-fs-objects
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
use_v4_signature = true
aws_region = eu-central-1

[block_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-block-objects
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
use_v4_signature = true
aws_region = eu-central-1

You also need to add memory cache configurations.

We'll explain the configurations below:

  • bucket: It's required to create separate buckets for commit, fs, and block objects. When creating your buckets on S3, please first read S3 bucket naming rules. Note especially not to use UPPERCASE letters in bucket names (don't use camel style names, such as MyCommitOjbects).
  • key_id and key: The key_id and key are required to authenticate you to S3. You can find the key_id and key in the "security credentials" section on your AWS account page.
  • use_v4_signature: There are two versions of authentication protocols that can be used with S3 storage. Version 2 is the older one, which may still be supported by some regions; version 4 is the current one used by most regions. If you don't set this option, Seafile will use v2 protocol. It's suggested to use v4 protocol.
  • aws_region: If you use v4 protocol, set this option to the region you chose when you create the buckets. If it's not set and you're using v4 protocol, Seafile will use us-east-1 as the default. This option will be ignored if you use v2 protocol.

For file search and webdav to work with the v4 signature mechanism, you need to add following lines to ~/.boto

[s3]
use-sigv4 = True

Use server-side encryption with customer-provided keys (SSE-C)

Since Pro 11.0, you can use SSE-C to S3. Add the following options to seafile.conf:

[commit_object_backend]
name = s3
......
use_v4_signature = true
use_https = true
sse_c_key = XiqMSf3x5ja4LRibBbV0sVntVpdHXl3P

[fs_object_backend]
name = s3
......
use_v4_signature = true
use_https = true
sse_c_key = XiqMSf3x5ja4LRibBbV0sVntVpdHXl3P

[block_backend]
name = s3
......
use_v4_signature = true
use_https = true
sse_c_key = XiqMSf3x5ja4LRibBbV0sVntVpdHXl3P

sse_c_key is a string of 32 characters.

You can generate sse_c_key with the following command：

openssl rand -base64 24

Other Public Hosted S3 Storage

There are other S3-compatible cloud storage providers in the market, such as Blackblaze and Wasabi. Configuration for those providers are just a bit different from AWS. We don't assure the following configuration works for all providers. If you have problems please contact our support.

Edit seafile.conf, add the following lines:

[commit_object_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-commit-objects
host = <access endpoint for storage provider>
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
# v2 authentication protocol will be used if not set
use_v4_signature = true
# required for v4 protocol. ignored for v2 protocol.
aws_region = <region name for storage provider>

[fs_object_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-fs-objects
host = <access endpoint for storage provider>
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
use_v4_signature = true
aws_region = <region name for storage provider>

[block_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-block-objects
host = <access endpoint for storage provider>
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
use_v4_signature = true
aws_region = <region name for storage provider>

You also need to add memory cache configurations.

We'll explain the configurations below:

  • host: The endpoint by which you access the storage service. Usually it starts with the region name. It's required to provide the host address, otherwise Seafile will use AWS's address.
  • bucket: It's required to create separate buckets for commit, fs, and block objects.
  • key_id and key: The key_id and key are required to authenticate you to S3 storage.
  • use_v4_signature: There are two versions of authentication protocols that can be used with S3 storage. Version 2 is the older one, which may still be supported by some cloud providers; version 4 is the current one used by Amazon S3 and is supported by most providers. If you don't set this option, Seafile will use v2 protocol. It's suggested to use v4 protocol.
  • aws_region: If you use v4 protocol, set this option to the region you chose when you create the buckets. If it's not set and you're using v4 protocol, Seafile will use us-east-1 as the default. This option will be ignored if you use v2 protocol.

For file search and webdav to work with the v4 signature mechanism, you need to add following lines to ~/.boto

[s3]
use-sigv4 = True

Self-hosted S3 Storage

Many self-hosted object storage systems are now compatible with the S3 API, such as OpenStack Swift and Ceph's RADOS Gateway. You can use these S3-compatible storage systems as backend for Seafile. Here is an example config:

[commit_object_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-commit-objects
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
host = 192.168.1.123:8080
path_style_request = true

[fs_object_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-fs-objects
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
host = 192.168.1.123:8080
path_style_request = true

[block_backend]
name = s3
bucket = my-block-objects
key_id = your-key-id
key = your-secret-key
host = 192.168.1.123:8080
path_style_request = true

You also need to add memory cache configurations.

We'll explain the configurations below:

  • host: It is the address and port of the S3-compatible service. You cannot prepend "http" or "https" to the host option. By default it'll use http connections. If you want to use https connection, please set use_https = true option.
  • bucket: It's required to create separate buckets for commit, fs, and block objects.
  • key_id and key: The key_id and key are required to authenticate you to S3 storage.
  • path_style_request: This option asks Seafile to use URLs like https://192.168.1.123:8080/bucketname/object to access objects. In Amazon S3, the default URL format is in virtual host style, such as https://bucketname.s3.amazonaws.com/object. But this style relies on advanced DNS server setup. So most self-hosted storage systems only implement the path style format. So we recommend to set this option to true.

Below are a few options that are not shown in the example configuration above:

  • use_v4_signature: There are two versions of authentication protocols that can be used with S3 storage. Version 2 is the protocol supported by most self-hosted storage; version 4 is the current protocol used by AWS S3, but may not be supported by some self-hosted storage. If you don't set this option, Seafile will use v2 protocol. We recommend to use V2 first and if it doesn't work try V4.
  • aws_region: If you use v4 protocol, set this option to the region you chose when you create the buckets. If it's not set and you're using v4 protocol, Seafile will use us-east-1 as the default. This option will be ignored if you use v2 protocol.

Use HTTPS connections to S3

To use HTTPS connections to S3, add the following options to seafile.conf:

[commit_object_backend]
name = s3
......
use_https = true

[fs_object_backend]
name = s3
......
use_https = true

[block_backend]
name = s3
......
use_https = true

Because the server package is built on CentOS 6, if you're using Debian/Ubuntu, you have to copy the system CA bundle to CentOS's CA bundle path. Otherwise Seafile can't find the CA bundle so that the SSL connection will fail.

sudo mkdir -p /etc/pki/tls/certs
sudo cp /etc/ssl/certs/ca-certificates.crt /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt
sudo ln -s /etc/pki/tls/certs/ca-bundle.crt /etc/pki/tls/cert.pem

Another important note is that you must not use '.' in your bucket names. Otherwise the wildcard certificate for AWS S3 cannot be resolved. This is a limitation on AWS.

Run and Test

Now you can start Seafile by ./seafile.sh start and ./seahub.sh start and visit the website.