SFTPGo metadata plugin

⚠️ This plugin is deprecated and will no longer work starting from SFTPGo 2.6.0.

This plugin allows to store file metadata in supported database engines.

Supported metadata

The plugin supports the following metadata:

• modification time, it allows to support changing modification times for cloud storage backends (S3, Azure blob, Google Cloud Storage). So you can preserve modification times even when uploading files to cloud storage backends. Cloud storage backends have a flat structure instead of a hierarchy like you would see in a file system. Folders are just the prefix of the files. The plugin does not support setting "folder" modification time.

Configuration

The plugin can be configured within the plugins section of the SFTPGo configuration file. To start the plugin you have to use the serve subcommand. Here is the usage.

NAME:
   sftpgo-plugin-metadata serve - Launch the SFTPGo plugin, it must be called from an SFTPGo instance

USAGE:
   sftpgo-plugin-metadata serve [command options] [arguments...]

OPTIONS:
   --driver value  Database driver (required) [$SFTPGO_PLUGIN_METADATA_DRIVER]
   --dsn value     Data source URI (required) [$SFTPGO_PLUGIN_METADATA_DSN]
   --help, -h      show help (default: false)

The driver and dsn flags are required. Each flag can also be set using environment variables, for example the DSN can be set using the SFTPGO_PLUGIN_METADATA_DSN environment variable.

This is an example configuration.

...
  "plugins": [
    {
      "type": "metadata",
      "cmd": "<path to sftpgo-plugin-metadata>",
      "args": ["serve", "--driver", "postgres"],
      "sha256sum": "",
      "auto_mtls": true
    }
  ]
...

With the above example the plugin is configured to connect to PostgreSQL. We set the DSN using the SFTPGO_PLUGIN_METADATA_DSN environment variable.

The plugin will not start if it fails to connect to the configured database service, this will prevent SFTPGo from starting.

The plugin supports also the migrate and reset sub-commands that can be used in standalone mode and are useful for debugging purposes. Please refer to their help texts for usage.

Database tables

The plugin will automatically create the following database tables:

• metadata_folders
• metadata_files

Inspect your database for more details.

Supported database services

PostgreSQL

To use Postgres you have to use postgres as driver. If you have a database named sftpgo_metadata on localhost and you want to connect to it using the user sftpgo with the password sftpgopass you can use a DSN like the following one.

"host='127.0.0.1' port=5432 dbname='sftpgo_metadata' user='sftpgo' password='sftpgopass' sslmode=disable connect_timeout=10"

Please refer to the documentation here for details about the dsn.

MariaDB

⚠️ The plugin enforces a unique index on the folder path. Folder paths can have arbitrary lengths, so we store them as text. MySQL fails to add such index with error: Error 1170: BLOB/TEXT column 'path' used in key specification without a key length. MariaDB works fine, at least the recent versions such as 10.6.x.

To use MariaDB you have to use mysql as driver. If you have a database named sftpgo_metadata on localhost and you want to connect to it using the user sftpgo with the password sftpgopass you can use a DSN like the following one.

"sftpgo:sftpgopass@tcp([127.0.0.1]:3306)/sftpgo_metadata?collation=utf8mb4_unicode_ci&interpolateParams=true&timeout=10s&tls=false&writeTimeout=10s&readTimeout=10s&parseTime=true&clientFoundRows=true"

Please refer to the documentation here for details about the dsn.