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Local Drive
Local Drive on GitHub, 1 stars

Requirements

What Local Drive needs to run, and what the 1 GB target means.

The target

Local Drive is built to run comfortably on a 1 GB RAM machine. That target shapes real decisions:

  • SQLite rather than Postgres, so there is no second process to run and tune.
  • No Redis. The Linux page cache already keeps recently read files in RAM, using whatever memory is actually free, and evicting under real pressure rather than on a TTL.
  • Two background workers by default.
  • Files are streamed with a fixed 32 KB copy buffer. The server never buffers a whole file in memory, in either direction.
  • mem_limit: 512m on the server container, leaving room for the OS, the proxy, the two tiny helpers, and the filesystem cache, which is where SQLite's page cache benefit actually comes from.

Minimum
CPU Any 64 bit x86 or ARM
RAM 1 GB
Disk Enough for your files, plus a little for the database and thumbnails
OS Linux for the full feature set, Windows or macOS for everything except drive management
RAM 2 GB, which lets you raise ARGON2_MEMORY_KIB
Disk SSD for the database directory, anything for the library

Optional tools

ffmpeg and pdftoppm give video and PDF thumbnails. Both ship in the container image. If either is absent the server looks for it once at startup, logs what it found, and skips those jobs cleanly: the file keeps its type badge, and nothing is treated as an error.

Two places are searched, in this order:

  1. Anywhere on PATH.
  2. The directory holding the Local Drive binary.

The second exists because a self hosted server is often a binary dropped in a folder rather than something a package manager installed. Putting ffmpeg next to localdrive is easier than editing the system PATH, and it travels with the folder if it moves.

Fetching ffmpeg automatically

When ffmpeg is missing on Windows or Linux, the server downloads a build for its own platform and puts it beside the binary. It happens once, in the background, so the server answers requests immediately while it runs, and the download is verified by running it before anything is allowed to use it.

Set LOCALDRIVE_FETCH_FFMPEG=false to switch this off. Fetching an executable at runtime is something some operators will forbid outright, and that should be one variable rather than an argument with the software.

macOS is deliberately not fetched. The published builds are unsigned, so Gatekeeper quarantines them and the first run fails in a way that looks like a broken app rather than a missing tool. Install it with Homebrew there:

brew install ffmpeg

Thumbnails are made when a file is uploaded, so anything already on the server from before ffmpeg arrived keeps its type badge. Upload it again to get a preview.