nikarh/fileserver-samba repository overview

⁠nikarh/fileserver-samba⁠

An alpine image with smbd and nmbd. Also includes some other tools such as jq and curl.

This image scans a mounted volume to /home, for each folder inside it creates a new user and group (all users share the same UID and GID). Then it creates a share per user and starts smbd and nmbd.

⁠🏗️ Usage

version: '3.8'
services:
  samba:
    image: nikarh/fileserver-samba
    environment:
      UID: 1000
      GID: 1000
    ports:
      - 137:137/udp # nmbd
      - 138:138/udp # nmbd
      - 139:139 # smb over netbios
      - 445:445 # smb over tcp
    volumes:
      # Data directory. Should contain a folder per smb user.
      - /{data}:/home

⁠🤔 Considerations

I'm not a huge fan of SMB, but this is the most widely supported protocol for file sharing. With it files from my server are easily accessible from Linux, Mac, Windows, Android, and Android TV devices. Even though Samba can use either NTLM or Kerberos for authentication, for the widest target client device you would almost exclusively use NTLM. And NTLM is pure nonsense. Under no circumstances SMB service should be exposed outside of DMZ/NAT/firewall.

Considering that this service would always be running behind a firewall, security is not a huge deal in my case, so in the default configuration

• Encryption is disabled for performance reasons
• Users are automatically generated with passwords equal to usernames

This behavior can be overridden by mounting custom /etc/samba/smb-base.conf and /scripts/create-users.sh.

Also, this image creates a single read-write share for each user to their home directory. If some other layout is desired, mount a shell with a custom logic script to /scripts/create-shares.sh.

⁠⚠️ Automated build

This docker image is rebuilt automatically weekly with latest alpine base image and latest dependencies. This can lead to broken images in case the packages installed are not backward compatible in their configs or behavior.