Cloudreve

What Cloudreve does

Cloudreve is a self-hosted cloud drive. It gives users a web interface to upload, organize, preview and share files, while the files themselves can sit on the server’s disk, on remote Cloudreve nodes, on S3-compatible object storage such as Cloudflare R2, Backblaze B2 or MinIO, on OneDrive or SharePoint, or on several Chinese cloud object stores. Admins assign a storage policy to each user group, so different users can be stored in different places.

Uploads and downloads can go straight from the browser to the storage provider, which takes load off the server. Uploads are resumable and parallel. Users get share links with expiry dates, a recycle bin and, when version retention is on, earlier versions of files. Every storage backend is also reachable over WebDAV. Media metadata is extracted for search and tags, and archives can be previewed and extracted online. Integration with Aria2 or qBittorrent downloads files in the background. Office documents can be edited through any WOPI-compatible service such as Collabora Online, OnlyOffice or Office Online Server.

The documentation is explicit about what Cloudreve is not: it is a cloud drive in its own right, not a tool for managing files across several consumer cloud drives or for reselling other services.

Security and encryption

Encryption can be switched on per storage policy. Each stored file gets its own key, encrypted with a master key. By default the browser encrypts files during upload, which means the uploading client sees the file key; with upload relay enabled, the server does the encryption instead. Downloads of encrypted files always pass through Cloudreve for decryption. By default the master key is generated on first start and stored in the database alongside the file keys, and the documentation recommends storing it separately and rotating it. This protects data held by a storage provider, but it is not end-to-end encryption.

Self-hosting Cloudreve

Cloudreve offers Docker Compose, a single Docker container or a plain binary under a process supervisor, with prebuilt binaries for Linux, Windows and macOS on several CPU architectures. The Docker Compose setup includes PostgreSQL, Redis, Aria2 and thumbnail tools (VIPS, FFmpeg, LibreOffice). Without database settings it falls back to SQLite, which the documentation advises against for production; MySQL and PostgreSQL are supported, and Redis is optional. Full-text search needs Apache Tika and Meilisearch running alongside.

Community and Pro editions

The GitHub repository is the GPL-3.0 Community edition. A paid Pro edition is run with a license key, and the docs mark several features as Pro only: the Windows desktop sync client (which requires a Pro server), OpenID Connect sign-in and letting one user group use several storage policies. Upgrading keeps your data.

Hosted version

No hosted service is documented. A public demo instance is available.

Limitations

The Community edition has no official two-way desktop sync client, so it works more like a web drive than a Dropbox-style synced folder; WebDAV is the main way to reach files from other tools. Single sign-on also requires Pro. The default storage of the master key in the database weakens encryption unless you change it. Several of the built-in storage backends are Chinese cloud object stores.

Who it suits

Cloudreve fits people who want a personal or small public file-hosting site on cheap object storage, with share links and online preview. For synced folders on every device, look at Seafile or Nextcloud.