FileGator

Launch the image from the Azure Marketplace, and then connect over SSH as azureuser:

ssh azureuser@<vm-ip>

The first-boot service generates the per-VM administrator credentials within a few seconds of the instance starting.

Confirm that nginx and PHP FPM are active and that nginx is listening on port 80:

sudo systemctl is-active nginx php8.3-fpm
sudo ss -tlnp | grep ':80 '

The FileGator release is stamped as APP_VERSION in the front controller. Confirm the application, PHP and nginx versions:

grep -oE "APP_VERSION', '[0-9.]+'" /var/www/filegator/dist/index.php php -v | head -1 nginx -v

The image ships with no working default login. The first-boot service generates a fresh admin administrator password and writes it as a bcrypt hash into the user store, so the upstream default admin / admin123 is rejected. The bundled check confirms this end to end and lists the users and their permissions:

sudo systemctl is-active filegator-firstboot.service
sudo bash /usr/local/sbin/filegator-cred-roundtrip.sh

The guest account is retained with no permissions, so anonymous visitors reach the sign-in screen but can do nothing until they authenticate.

The per-VM credentials are written to a root-only file. Read the file to get the FILEGATOR_ADMIN_USER and FILEGATOR_ADMIN_PASSWORD values for signing in:

sudo cat /stage/scripts/filegator-credentials.log

Keep this file secure. After your first sign-in, change the administrator password from within the app.

The app responds on whatever address you reach it on. Confirm that it is serving locally, and then browse to http://<vm-ip>/ in your browser:

curl -s -o /dev/null -w 'HTTP %{http_code}\n' http://127.0.0.1/

Sign in as admin with the password from Step 5.

After you sign in, you land on the file manager. Use Add files to upload, New to create folders and files, and the row actions to download, copy, move, rename, zip and delete. Select one or more items to reveal the batch actions, including zip and batch download.

Open Users to manage accounts. Each user has a role, a home directory and a granular permission set (read, write, upload, download, batch download, zip, chmod). You can therefore give some people upload-only access and others full management of their own folder.

Open your profile from the top navigation to change the administrator password. Set a new password after your first sign-in, and store it in your own secrets manager.

Components and paths:

FileGator application /var/www/filegator/

Document root /var/www/filegator/dist/

Configuration /var/www/filegator/configuration.php

Storage root /var/www/filegator/repository/

User store /var/www/filegator/private/users.json

nginx vhost /etc/nginx/sites-available/filegator.conf

First-boot script /usr/local/sbin/filegator-firstboot.sh

Credentials /stage/scripts/filegator-credentials.log (mode 0600 root:root)

• Change the administrator password from your profile after the first sign-in.
• Enable HTTPS by installing certbot and requesting a certificate for your domain:

sudo apt-get install -y certbot python3-certbot-nginx
sudo certbot --nginx -d your-domain.example.com

• Restrict the network security group so that ports 80 and 443 are open only to your CDN or load balancer, and port 22 is open only to your management network.
• Create least-privilege users in the Users panel. Give each person only the permissions and home directory that person needs.
• Keep the OS patched regularly with sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade.
• Point your domain at the instance. Because the app is host-agnostic, no URL rewrite is needed.