Seafile.conf settings

Important

Every entry in this configuration file is case-sensitive.

You need to restart seafile and seahub so that your changes take effect.

./seahub.sh restart
./seafile.sh restart

Storage Quota Setting

You may set a default quota (e.g. 2GB) for all users. To do this, just add the following lines to seafile.conf file

[quota]
# default user quota in GB, integer only
default = 2

This setting applies to all users. If you want to set quota for a specific user, you may log in to seahub website as administrator, then set it in "System Admin" page.

Since Pro 10.0.9 version, you can set the maximum number of files allowed in a library, and when this limit is exceeded, files cannot be uploaded to this library. There is no limit by default.

[quota]
library_file_limit = 100000

Default history length limit

If you don't want to keep all file revision history, you may set a default history length limit for all libraries.

[history]
keep_days = days of history to keep

Default trash expiration time

The default time for automatic cleanup of the libraries trash is 30 days.You can modify this time by adding the following configuration：

[library_trash]
expire_days = 60

System Trash

Seafile uses a system trash, where deleted libraries will be moved to. In this way, accidentally deleted libraries can be recovered by system admin.

Cache (Pro Edition Only)

Seafile Pro Edition uses memory caches in various cases to improve performance. Some session information is also saved into memory cache to be shared among the cluster nodes. Memcached or Reids can be use for memory cache.

If you use memcached:

[memcached]
# Replace `localhost` with the memcached address:port if you're using remote memcached
# POOL-MIN and POOL-MAX is used to control connection pool size. Usually the default is good enough.
memcached_options = --SERVER=localhost --POOL-MIN=10 --POOL-MAX=100

If you use redis:

[redis]
# your redis server address
redis_host = 127.0.0.1
# your redis server port
redis_port = 6379
# size of connection pool to redis, default is 100
max_connections = 100

Redis support is added in version 11.0. Currently only single-node Redis is supported. Redis Sentinel or Cluster is not supported yet.

Seafile fileserver configuration

The configuration of seafile fileserver is in the [fileserver] section of the file seafile.conf

[fileserver]
# bind address for fileserver
# default to 0.0.0.0, if deployed without proxy: no access restriction
# set to 127.0.0.1, if used with local proxy: only access by local
host = 127.0.0.1
# tcp port for fileserver
port = 8082

Since Community Edition 6.2 and Pro Edition 6.1.9, you can set the number of worker threads to server http requests. Default value is 10, which is a good value for most use cases.

[fileserver]
worker_threads = 15

Change upload/download settings.

[fileserver]
# Set maximum upload file size to 200M.
# If not configured, there is no file size limit for uploading.
max_upload_size=200

# Set maximum download directory size to 200M.
# Default is 100M.
max_download_dir_size=200

After a file is uploaded via the web interface, or the cloud file browser in the client, it needs to be divided into fixed size blocks and stored into storage backend. We call this procedure "indexing". By default, the file server uses 1 thread to sequentially index the file and store the blocks one by one. This is suitable for most cases. But if you're using S3/Ceph/Swift backends, you may have more bandwidth in the storage backend for storing multiple blocks in parallel. We provide an option to define the number of concurrent threads in indexing:

[fileserver]
max_indexing_threads = 10

When users upload files in the web interface (seahub), file server divides the file into fixed size blocks. Default blocks size for web uploaded files is 8MB. The block size can be set here.

[fileserver]
#Set block size to 2MB
fixed_block_size=2

When users upload files in the web interface, file server assigns an token to authorize the upload operation. This token is valid for 1 hour by default. When uploading a large file via WAN, the upload time can be longer than 1 hour. You can change the token expire time to a larger value.

[fileserver]
#Set uploading time limit to 3600s
web_token_expire_time=3600

You can download a folder as a zip archive from seahub, but some zip software on windows doesn't support UTF-8, in which case you can use the "windows_encoding" settings to solve it.

[zip]
# The file name encoding of the downloaded zip file.
windows_encoding = iso-8859-1

The "httptemp" directory contains temporary files created during file upload and zip download. In some cases the temporary files are not cleaned up after the file transfer was interrupted. Starting from 7.1.5 version, file server will regularly scan the "httptemp" directory to remove files created long time ago.

[fileserver]
# After how much time a temp file will be removed. The unit is in seconds. Default to 3 days.
http_temp_file_ttl = x
# File scan interval. The unit is in seconds. Default to 1 hour.
http_temp_scan_interval = x

New in Seafile Pro 7.1.16 and Pro 8.0.3: You can set the maximum number of files contained in a library that can be synced by the Seafile client. The default is 100000. When you download a repo, Seafile client will request fs id list, and you can control the timeout period of this request through fs_id_list_request_timeout configuration, which defaults to 5 minutes. These two options are added to prevent long fs-id-list requests from overloading the server.

Since Pro 8.0.4 version, you can set both options to -1, to allow unlimited size and timeout.

[fileserver]
max_sync_file_count = 100000
fs_id_list_request_timeout = 300

If you use object storage as storage backend, when a large file is frequently downloaded, the same blocks need to be fetched from the storage backend to Seafile server. This may waste bandwith and cause high load on the internal network. Since Seafile Pro 8.0.5 version, we add block caching to improve the situation.

• To enable this feature, set use_block_cache option in the [fileserver] group. It's not enabled by default.
• The block_cache_size_limit option is used to limit the size of the cache. Its default value is 10GB. The blocks are cached in seafile-data/block-cache directory. When the total size of cached files exceeds the limit, seaf-server will clean up older files until the size reduces to 70% of the limit. The cleanup interval is 5 minutes. You have to have a good estimate on how much space you need for the cache directory. Otherwise on frequent downloads this directory can be quickly filled up.
• The block_cache_file_types configuration is used to choose the file types that are cached. block_cache_file_types the default value is mp4;mov.

[fileserver]
use_block_cache = true
# Set block cache size limit to 100MB
block_cache_size_limit = 100
block_cache_file_types = mp4;mov

When a large number of files are uploaded through the web page and API, it will be expensive to calculate block IDs based on the block contents. Since Seafile-pro-9.0.6, you can add the skip_block_hash option to use a random string as block ID.

Warning

This option will prevent fsck from checking block content integrity. You should specify --shallow option to fsck to not check content integrity.

[fileserver]
skip_block_hash = true

If you want to limit the type of files when uploading files, since Seafile Pro 10.0.0 version, you can set file_ext_white_list option in the [fileserver] group. This option is a list of file types, only the file types in this list are allowed to be uploaded. It's not enabled by default.

[fileserver]
file_ext_white_list = md;mp4;mov

Since seafile 10.0.1, when you use go fileserver, you can set upload_limit and download_limit option in the [fileserver] group to limit the speed of file upload and download. It's not enabled by default.

[fileserver]
# The unit is in KB/s.
upload_limit = 100
download_limit = 100

Since Seafile 11.0.7 Pro, you can ask file server to check virus for every file uploaded with web APIs. Find more options about virus scanning at virus scan.

[fileserver]
# default is false
check_virus_on_web_upload = true

Database configuration

The configurations of database are stored in the [database] section.

From Seafile 11.0, the SQLite is not supported

[database]
type=mysql
host=127.0.0.1
user=root
password=root
db_name=seafile_db
connection_charset=utf8
max_connections=100

When you configure seafile server to use MySQL, the default connection pool size is 100, which should be enough for most use cases.

Since Seafile 10.0.2, you can enable the encrypted connections to the MySQL server by adding the following configuration options:

[database]
use_ssl = true
skip_verify = false
ca_path = /etc/mysql/ca.pem

When set use_ssl to true and skip_verify to false, it will check whether the MySQL server certificate is legal through the CA configured in ca_path. The ca_path is a trusted CA certificate path for signing MySQL server certificates. When skip_verify is true, there is no need to add the ca_path option. The MySQL server certificate won't be verified at this time.

File Locking (Pro edition only)

The Seafile Pro server auto expires file locks after some time, to prevent a locked file being locked for too long. The expire time can be tune in seafile.conf file.

[file_lock]
default_expire_hours = 6

The default is 12 hours.

Since Seafile-pro-9.0.6, you can add cache for getting locked files (reduce server load caused by sync clients). Since Pro Edition 12, this option is enabled by default.

[file_lock]
use_locked_file_cache = true

At the same time, you also need to configure the following memcache options for the cache to take effect:

[memcached]
memcached_options = --SERVER=<the IP of Memcached Server> --POOL-MIN=10 --POOL-MAX=100

Storage Backends

You may configure Seafile to use various kinds of object storage backends.

• S3 or S3-compatible object storage
• Ceph RADOS
• OpenStack Swift

You may also configure Seafile to use multiple storage backends at the same time.

Cluster

When you deploy Seafile in a cluster, you should add the following configuration:

[cluster]
enabled = true

Tip

Since version 12, if you use Docker to deploy cluster, this option is no longer needed.

Enable Slow Log

Since Seafile-pro-6.3.10, you can enable seaf-server's RPC slow log to do performance analysis.The slow log is enabled by default.

If you want to configure related options, add the options to seafile.conf:

[slow_log]
# default to true
enable_slow_log = true
# the unit of all slow log thresholds is millisecond.
# default to 5000 milliseconds, only RPC queries processed for longer than 5000 milliseconds will be  logged.
rpc_slow_threshold = 5000

You can find seafile_slow_rpc.log in logs/slow_logs. You can also use log-rotate to rotate the log files. You just need to send SIGUSR2 to seaf-server process. The slow log file will be closed and reopened.

Since 9.0.2 Pro, the signal to trigger log rotation has been changed to SIGUSR1. This signal will trigger rotation for all log files opened by seaf-server. You should change your log rotate settings accordingly.

Enable Access Log

Even though Nginx logs all requests with certain details, such as url, response code, upstream process time, it's sometimes desirable to have more context about the requests, such as the user id for each request. Such information can only be logged from file server itself. Since 9.0.2 Pro, access log feature is added to fileserver.

To enable access log, add below options to seafile.conf:

[fileserver]
# default to false. If enabled, fileserver-access.log will be written to log directory.
enable_access_log = true

The log format is as following:

start time - user id - url - response code - process time

You can use SIGUSR1 to trigger log rotation.

Go Fileserver

Seafile 9.0 introduces a new fileserver implemented in Go programming language. To enable it, you can set the options below in seafile.conf:

[fileserver]
use_go_fileserver = true

Go fileserver has 3 advantages over the traditional fileserver implemented in C language:

1. Better performance when syncing libraries with large number of files. With C fileserver, syncing large libraries may consume all the worker threads in the server and make the service slow. There is a config option max_sync_file_count to limit the size of library to be synced. The default is 100K. With Go fileserver you can set this option to a much higher number, such as 1 million.
2. Downloading zipped folders on the fly. And there is no limit on the size of the downloaded folder. With C fileserver, the server has to first create a zip file for the downloaded folder then send it to the client. With Go fileserver, the zip file can be created while transferring to the client. The option max_download_dir_size is thus no longer needed by Go fileserver.
3. Since version 10.0 you can also set upload/download rate limits.

Go fileserver caches fs objects in memory. On the one hand, it avoids repeated creation and destruction of repeatedly accessed objects; on the other hand it will also slow down the speed at which objects are released, which will prevent go's gc mechanism from consuming too much CPU time. You can set the size of memory used by fs cache through the following options.

[fileserver]
# The unit is in M. Default to 2G.
fs_cache_limit = 100

Profiling Go Fileserver Performance

Since Seafile 9.0.7, you can enable the profile function of go fileserver by adding the following configuration options:

# profile_password is required, change it for your need
[fileserver]
enable_profiling = true
profile_password = 8kcUz1I2sLaywQhCRtn2x1

This interface can be used through the pprof tool provided by Go language. See https://pkg.go.dev/net/http/pprof for details. Note that you have to first install Go on the client that issues the below commands. The password parameter should match the one you set in the configuration.

go tool pprof http://localhost:8082/debug/pprof/heap?password=8kcUz1I2sLaywQhCRtn2x1
go tool pprof http://localhost:8082/debug/pprof/profile?password=8kcUz1I2sLaywQhCRtn2x1

Notification server configuration

Since Seafile 10.0.0, you can ask Seafile server to send notifications (file changes, lock changes and folder permission changes) to Notification Server component.

[notification]
enabled = true
# IP address of the server running notification server
# or "notification-server" if you are running notification server container on the same host as Seafile server
host = 192.168.0.83
# the port of notification server
port = 8083

Tip

The configuration here only works for version >= 12.0. The configuration for notificaton server has been changed in 12.0 to make it clearer. The new configuration is not compatible with older versions.