v0.29.0

filex v0.29.0

Self-hosted file manager — Go single binary + multi-framework frontend.

Download a binary below, or pull a Docker image:

docker pull ghcr.io/brf-tech/filex:slim-v0.29.0
docker pull ghcr.io/brf-tech/filex:full-v0.29.0

What changed

Added

• Open an Office document that lives on your own computer, in the editor your
  server runs. Double-click a .docx, .xlsx or .pptx (ten Office types in
  all) and the desktop app opens it — on a machine with no Office installed.
  Most Linux desktops have none, many Macs have none, and plenty of Windows
  machines have none either; filex already had a perfectly good editor and the
  documents on those disks had no way into it.

  Two routes, picked per document. A document inside a folder you keep on this
  computer opens as itself — no copy, no write-back, saving goes to the
  server and sync brings it down again. A paused pair is deliberately not
  treated as one: the save would reach the server and never come back, and you
  would believe you had saved. Anything else is copied to a scratch area on the
  server, edited there, and written back over the original path on every save,
  with a strip along the bottom of the window naming the file the whole time.

  The write-back is where an editor destroys work, so: the replace is atomic
  (temp file in the same directory, then rename — never across devices, never a
  partial write over the document); a document deleted while it was open is not
  resurrected, its bytes are kept beside it as <name>.filex-recovered-<time>;
  a refused rename keeps the edit, says so in a dialog and a notification, and
  names where it kept it; the scratch copy survives a grace period after the
  window closes, because OnlyOffice posts its save roughly ten seconds after the
  editor disconnects and deleting on close would discard the last edit of every
  session; and a sweep at next start clears whatever a crash left behind.

  Registration is deliberately conservative. The installer adds filex to the
  "Open with" list and changes nothing that is already set: electron-builder's
  own fileAssociations macro writes the default ProgId for each extension —
  it takes the file type at install time, which on a machine with no Office is
  precisely how filex would become the handler without anyone being asked — so
  the Windows registration is hand-written instead, and macOS registers as
  Alternate rather than Default. Making filex the default is always an
  explicit action: xdg-mime does it on Linux from Settings, Windows opens the
  default-apps pane (UserChoice is hash-protected and cannot be set by an
  application, and filex does not pretend otherwise), and macOS explains the
  Finder route. See docs/DESKTOP.md.

• An end-user front door: …/drive. A non-admin account has always landed
  in the file manager rather than the admin panel — the router redirected them
  out of it and every /api/admin/* route re-checked the role — but everything
  around that screen said otherwise. The URL was /admin/explore, the browser
  tab said "filex Admin", and the login form said "Use your filex admin
  credentials". Deploy filex for a team and each of your users was told three
  times, before seeing a single file, that this was an administrator's tool.

  The same app is now also served at /drive, with a per-route document title
  and login copy written for everyone. /admin is untouched and every existing
  bookmark still resolves. (Reported as #14.)

• tag: and -tag: filters in search. Tags have been a filex feature for
  a long time and were not in the search index at all, so tag:invoice searched
  for a file named "tag:invoice" and came back empty. They are now a filter
  rather than a search term, combinable with free text (invoice 2026 tag:paid), resolved against the database so a re-tag is visible immediately,
  and applied before the result limit so limit counts filtered rows. A tag
  that does not exist returns nothing — never the whole storage.

• The filex.sh landing page is in the repository, at site/, deployed with
  scripts/sync-site.sh, and covered by the release documentation audit. It had
  lived only on the static host, so there was nothing to edit and nobody edited
  it: it still described roughly v0.14 — no desktop app, no sync, no protocol
  endpoints, no filex mount, no LDAP, no plugins, no search, no
  multi-tenancy — and claimed five storage drivers when there are six plus a
  plugin API.

Fixed

• Filename search depended on which separator the file's name used.
  invoice 2026 did not find invoice_2026.pdf, and main go did not find
  main.go, while foo bar found foo-bar.txt — an inconsistency with a
  single cause. Name search was a disjunction of an analysed match and an
  unanalysed *term* wildcard: the wildcard half cannot match anything once the
  query contains a space, leaving only the analysed half, whose tokeniser splits
  on - but joins on _ and keeps main.go whole. So whether search worked
  was decided by the file's punctuation.

  Names are now indexed a second time in a normalised form (every run of
  non-alphanumerics collapsed to one space) and the query is normalised the same
  way, so ., -, _ and a space are interchangeable. Multi-word queries
  require one *word* wildcard per word instead of one over the whole string.
  The normalisation is done in Go rather than as a Bleve field mapping on
  purpose: a mapping is frozen into the index when it is created, so a fresh
  install and an upgraded one would have analysed the same filename two
  different ways. (Reported as #15.)

• One typo is now forgiven. mian.go finds main.go. The fuzzy pass runs
  only when the strict pass came back short of the limit, and its hits rank
  below every exact and prefix match. Edit distance scales with word length
  (none at three characters or fewer, one up to seven, two above).

• Ranking is now decided, not inherited. The order is exact filename →
  prefix → name → path → fuzzy → content, asserted by a test. It had been
  whatever merging two queries' relevance scores produced: measured before this
  change, report-final.txt ranked above report.txt for the query report.
  Exact matching compares the name both with and without its extension.

• The same query meant different things in different boxes. GET /api/ai/search and the MCP file_search tool passed the raw string through,
  so tag:source was read there as a filename and invoice 2026 found nothing
  — while the toolbar and /api/files/search understood both. All four now
  share one parser and one fallback plan.

• The explorer's onboarding tour described a search that does not exist. It
  said "This box filters the current folder"; the toolbar search covers the
  whole storage, and every storage when the multi-storage root is open. Its
  placeholder said "File name". Both were wrong before this release and are
  fixed in the shared component, so every surface gets the correction.

• The explorer told a non-admin to configure a storage. With no visible
  storage it showed "No storages configured yet" — for a user account that
  almost always means nothing has been shared with them, so it sent people to
  fix something they have no permission to fix.

• An installed PWA ejected itself into a browser tab. The manifest scope was
  /admin/, so the first navigation to the new /drive front door left the
  installed app. The manifest scope now covers both; the service worker's scope
  and the manifest id are deliberately unchanged (a changed id turns every
  existing install into a second app).

Full changelog entry