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Docker

SFTPGo provides an official Docker image, it is available on both Docker Hub and on GitHub Container Registry.

How to use the SFTPGo image

Start a sftpgo server instance

Starting a SFTPGo instance is simple:

docker run --name some-sftpgo -p 8080:8080 -p 2022:2022 -d "drakkan/sftpgo:tag"

... where some-sftpgo is the name you want to assign to your container, and tag is the tag specifying the SFTPGo version you want. See the list above for relevant tags.

Now visit http://localhost:8080/web/admin, replacing localhost with the appropriate IP address if SFTPGo is not reachable on localhost, create the first admin and a new SFTPGo user. The SFTP service is available on port 2022.

If you don't want to persist any files, for example for testing purposes, you can run an SFTPGo instance like this:

docker run --rm --name some-sftpgo -p 8080:8080 -p 2022:2022 -d "drakkan/sftpgo:tag"

If you prefer GitHub Container Registry to Docker Hub replace drakkan/sftpgo:tag with ghcr.io/drakkan/sftpgo:tag.

Container shell access and viewing SFTPGo logs

The docker exec command allows you to run commands inside a Docker container. The following command line will give you a shell inside your sftpgo container:

docker exec -it some-sftpgo sh

The logs are available through Docker's container log:

docker logs some-sftpgo

Container graceful shutdown

docker run --name some-sftpgo \
    -p 2022:2022 \
    -e SFTPGO_GRACE_TIME=32 \
    -d "drakkan/sftpgo:tag"

Setting the SFTPGO_GRACE_TIME environment variable to a non zero value when creating or running a container will enable a graceful shutdown period in seconds that will allow existing connections to hopefully complete before being forcibly closed when the time has passed.

While the SFTPGo container is in graceful shutdown mode waiting for the last connection(s) to finish, no new connections will be allowed.

If no connections are active or SFTPGO_GRACE_TIME=0 (default value if unset) the container will shutdown immediately.

⚠ The default docker grace time is 10 seconds, so if your SFTPGO_GRACE_TIME is larger than the docker grace time, then any docker stop some-sftpgo command will terminate your container once the docker grace time has passed. To ensure that the full SFTPGO_GRACE_TIME can be used, you can send a SIGINT or SIGTERM signal. Those signals can be sent using one of these commands: docker kill --signal=SIGINT some-sftpgo or docker kill --signal=SIGTERM some-sftpgo. Alternatively you can increase the default docker grace time to a value larger than your SFTPGO_GRACE_TIME. The default docker grace time can either be specified at creation/run time using --stop-timeout <value> or you can simply add --time <value> to the docker stop command like in this 60 seconds example docker stop --time 60 some-sftpgo.

Where to Store Data

Important note: There are several ways to store data used by applications that run in Docker containers. We encourage users of the SFTPGo images to familiarize themselves with the options available, including:

  • Let Docker manage the storage for SFTPGo data by writing them to disk on the host system using its own internal volume management. This is the default and is easy and fairly transparent to the user. The downside is that the files may be hard to locate for tools and applications that run directly on the host system, i.e. outside containers.
  • Create a data directory on the host system (outside the container) and mount this to a directory visible from inside the container. This places the SFTPGo files in a known location on the host system, and makes it easy for tools and applications on the host system to access the files. The downside is that the user needs to make sure that the directory exists, and that e.g. directory permissions and other security mechanisms on the host system are set up correctly. The SFTPGo image runs using 1000 as UID/GID by default.

The Docker documentation is a good starting point for understanding the different storage options and variations, and there are multiple blogs and forum postings that discuss and give advice in this area. We will simply show the basic procedure here for the latter option above:

  1. Create a data directory on a suitable volume on your host system, e.g. /my/own/sftpgodata. The user with ID 1000 must be able to write to this directory. Please note that you don't need an actual user with ID 1000 on your host system: chown -R 1000:1000 /my/own/sftpgodata is enough even if there is no user/group with UID/GID 1000.
  2. Create a home directory for the sftpgo container user on your host system e.g. /my/own/sftpgohome. As with the data directory above, make sure that the user with ID 1000 can write to this directory: chown -R 1000:1000 /my/own/sftpgohome
  3. Start your SFTPGo container like this:
docker run --name some-sftpgo \
    -p 8080:8090 \
    -p 2022:2022 \
    --mount type=bind,source=/my/own/sftpgodata,target=/srv/sftpgo \
    --mount type=bind,source=/my/own/sftpgohome,target=/var/lib/sftpgo \
    -d "drakkan/sftpgo:tag"

As you can see SFTPGo uses two main volumes:

  • /srv/sftpgo to handle persistent data. The default home directory for SFTP/FTP/WebDAV users is /srv/sftpgo/data/<username>. Backups are stored in /srv/sftpgo/backups
  • /var/lib/sftpgo is the home directory for the sftpgo system user defined inside the container. This is the container working directory too, host keys will be created here when using the default configuration.

If you want to get fine grained control, you can also mount /srv/sftpgo/data and /srv/sftpgo/backups as separate volumes instead of mounting /srv/sftpgo.

Configuration

The runtime configuration can be customized via environment variables that you can set passing the -e option to the docker run command or inside the environment section if you are using docker stack deploy or docker-compose.

Please take a look here to learn how to configure SFTPGo via environment variables.

Alternately you can mount your custom configuration file to /var/lib/sftpgo or /var/lib/sftpgo/.config/sftpgo.

Running as an arbitrary user

The SFTPGo image runs using 1000 as UID/GID by default. If you know the permissions of your data and/or configuration directory are already set appropriately or you have need of running SFTPGo with a specific UID/GID, it is possible to invoke this image with --user set to any value (other than root/0) in order to achieve the desired access/configuration:

$ ls -lnd data
drwxr-xr-x 2 1100 1100 6  7 nov 09.09 data
$ ls -lnd config
drwxr-xr-x 2 1100 1100 6  7 nov 09.19 config

With the above directory permissions, you can start a SFTPGo instance like this:

docker run --name some-sftpgo \
    --user 1100:1100 \
    -p 8080:8080 \
    -p 2022:2022 \
    --mount type=bind,source="${PWD}/data",target=/srv/sftpgo \
    --mount type=bind,source="${PWD}/config",target=/var/lib/sftpgo \
    -d "drakkan/sftpgo:tag"

Alternately build your own image using the official one as a base, here is a sample Dockerfile:

FROM drakkan/sftpgo:tag
USER root
RUN chown -R 1100:1100 /etc/sftpgo && chown 1100:1100 /var/lib/sftpgo /srv/sftpgo
USER 1100:1100

Image Variants

The sftpgo images comes in many flavors, each designed for a specific use case. The edge, edge-slim, edge-alpine, and edge-alpine-slim tags are updated after each new commit.

sftpgo:<version>

This is the defacto image, it is based on Debian, available in the debian official image. If you are unsure about what your needs are, you probably want to use this one.

sftpgo:<version>-alpine

This image is based on the popular Alpine Linux project, available in the alpine official image. Alpine Linux is much smaller than most distribution base images (~5MB), and thus leads to much slimmer images in general.

This variant is highly recommended when final image size being as small as possible is desired. The main caveat to note is that it does use musl libc instead of glibc and friends, so certain software might run into issues depending on the depth of their libc requirements. However, most software doesn't have an issue with this, so this variant is usually a very safe choice. See this Hacker News comment thread for more discussion of the issues that might arise and some pro/con comparisons of using Alpine-based images.

sftpgo:<version>-distroless

This image is based on the popular Distroless project. We use the latest Debian based distroless image as base.

Distroless variant contains only a statically linked sftpgo binary and its minimal runtime dependencies and so it doesn't allow shell access (no shell is installed). SQLite support is disabled since it requires CGO and so a C runtime which is not installed. The default data provider is bolt, all the supported data providers except sqlite work. We only provide the slim variant and so the optional git dependency is not available.

sftpgo:<suite>-slim

These tags provide a slimmer image that does not include jq and the optional git and rsync dependencies.

sftpgo:<suite>-plugins

These tags provide the standard image with the addition of all "official" plugins installed in /usr/local/bin.

Helm Chart

An helm chart is available. You can find the source code here.

This chart is not maintained by the SFTPGo project and any issues with it should be raised to the upstream repo.