We are excited to announce the release of FileSender version 3.0! This highly anticipated release features a significantly enhanced user interface (UI), which elevates the overall user experience. Additionally, there have been great updates to the statistics page, file forwarding support and optional initial support for OpenPGP for guests. These improvements make FileSender more accessible, efficient, and user-friendly, increasing user satisfaction and strengthening its wider adoption, particularly within academic and research communities where secure large-file sharing is crucial. FileSender has made this remarkable progress over the past few years as an open source project, developed and improved collaboratively by people from around the world. It is a truly international effort, achieved through the hard work and dedication of everyone involved. We are grateful to the global NREN community for supporting the FileSender project to evolve.
FileSender is an open source web application that organizations can install at no cost. Through FileSender, organizations can offer their users an online service with which they can share their files securely whilst using local storage options. Organizations are completely free in the way they install FileSender in their infrastructure and organizations are able to host FileSender on-premises, in a private cloud in an appropriate data centre or on a public cloud of choice. This means they can offer the FileSender service in line with their own preferences, policies, and legal compliance requirements.
FileSender 3.x series and migration
FileSender 3.x series progressed through alpha, beta, and release candidate stages:
- Alpha versions: started with 3.0.alpha1 on August 2, 2021, and ended with 3.0.alpha9 on January 25, 2023;
- Beta versions: from 3.0.beta1 on May 2, 2023 – to 3.0.beta7 April 26, 2024;
- Release candidates: from 3.0.rc1 on July 1, 2024 – to 3.0.rc12 on November 21, 2025.
These versions included updates aimed at testing, refinement and validation, encouraging administrators to investigate them and provide feedback. At least three major sites have deployed the 3.x series in production. While advancing the FileSender version 3.0 release candidate to an official release, it is essential to make the transition from the 2.x series as simple as possible for administrators and ensure that everything goes smoothly.
From a technical perspective, Ben Martin, the Lead Developer for FileSender, has made significant efforts to make sure that the 2.x and 3.x series releases are synchronised for features they have in common. For example, the 3.0rc5 release mentions that “The core code is now inline with release 2.52”. This means that the stored files and database should be compatible between these versions. The code performing encryption and storage of the files should also be compatible. As a result, an installation can upgrade to the most recent 2.x series and install the 3.0 version of FileSender for testing purposes. The FileSender version 3.0 can utilize the same file storage and database, allowing users to validate their 3.0 installation before going live. Existing uploads from a 2.x installation should be available for the 3.0 release, facilitating a seamless migration.
Release candidates have been subjected to extensive real-world usage and have proven to be reliable and stable. Currently, several NREN sites have deployed FileSender version 3.0 release candidates, including AARNet (Australia), REANNZ (New Zealand), RENU (Uganda), RNP (Brazil) and VPC (Latvia). Also, at the regional level, FileSender version 3.0 is deployed by the EOSC EU Node platform in Europe and RedCLARA in Latin America.
“The FileSender Board is excited to see FileSender’s journey to a refreshed UI come to completion with the production release of version 3.0. Much has changed under the hood, allowing the inevitable future UI updates to be done with less effort and time. We’re also very pleased with the increase in community contributed effort, which significantly strengthens our global FileSender development collaboration. RNP’s work on the new UI, AARNet’s contribution of improved statistics, and NII’s addition of Federation support with named endpoints empower all NRENs to better support data-driven research and education”.
New UI usability
The new FileSender 3.0 interface has been completely redesigned with a focus on enhancing user experience. Research and testing, based on a user-centered approach, identified friction points in the previous version. These insights led to the creation of a cleaner, more modern and organized interface, making it easier for users to navigate and perform key actions – such as sending, receiving, and managing files – in a more intuitive and streamlined way. The new UI is not overloaded with information, guiding users through the process and only displaying additional information when they choose to see it.
In the initial design, the transfer flow was divided into a step-by-step process. However, based on feedback from the field testing, we have streamlined it to include fewer steps. Field reports indicated that the original flow did not clearly show users what the next step was, leading to unexpected decision points. The redesigned flow maintains a guiding function for end users while also providing an overview of the various options they will encounter during the transfer process, helping to minimize surprises. The final design remains compact and avoids overwhelming users by incorporating a foldable settings tab.
The visual experience has been improved for better clarity and accessibility. The new UI is now more responsive, automatically adapting to various devices and screen sizes, such as smartphones, tablets, and desktops. Reactive components have been developed to provide instant feedback to user interactions, creating a sense of fluidity and dynamism.
The design prioritizes user-friendliness, ensuring consistency in elements such as buttons, fonts, and others:
- The base colours of the UI are black, grey and white, with blue as the primary colour. This primary colour can be easily customized to align with the preferences of FileSender operating organizations, allowing NRENs to implement their own branding and brand colours. They can also add their logo.
- The new design promotes the invitation functionality, addressing feedback from users who were either unaware of this feature or unsure how to utilize it. Therefore, the invitation flow has been simplified for better understanding and ease of use.
The new UI represents a significant step in modernizing the service, preserving its robustness while paving the way for future developments.
All current Gold- and Silver-level contributors – AARNet (Australia), Belnet (Belgium), HEAnet (Ireland), RNP (Brazil), SURF (the Netherlands) and Switch (Switzerland) – benefit from their logos appearing in the banner at the bottom of the new UI in FileSender version 3.0.
RNP contribution to the new UI implementation
RNP, the Brazilian NREN, has played a major role in implementing the new UI by offering extensive support. The new UI was introduced with pull request 1530, followed by a number of subsequent pull requests aimed at stabilising the UI.
“RNP makes extensive use of FileSender and actively promotes its adoption across Brazil. The platform has proven to be an essential tool for students and university staff to share large files, supporting academic and scientific collaboration. RNP believes in the project's potential and is committed to contributing to its continuous development. Over the years, we have already developed several internal components and features for FileSender, so we had a solid technical understanding of the platform, which made us even more confident and motivated to contribute more directly”.
From a technical perspective, the RNP software developers team worked on creating new UI components, custom themes, and a redesigned screen structure. The industry best practices were adhered to, including component and page-based styling, the BEM CSS methodology, conventional commits, feature-based file organization, and other standards aimed at improving maintainability and scalability.
At RNP, development was organized around system features, allowing for a modular and efficient approach. Each functionality was handled as an independent unit, facilitating easier testing, maintenance, and future improvements. Additionally, new global styles and themes were created to ensure a consistent look and feel throughout the system.
AARNet contribution to the statistics page update
AARNet, the Australian NREN, contributed to updating the statistics page, which is currently only available in the 3.x series.
“AARNet adopted FileSender version 3 in its early stages of development to help mature the product and get some mileage on it, much like we did with version 2 years ago. I wanted an easy way to share FileSender statistics with our customers. While we could have simply provided usernames/passwords to our Grafana dashboards or email screenshots, having this as a built-in feature of FileSender would benefit everyone, so that the community can use, improve and extend later, rather than working in isolation. If it’s useful for us, it’s probably useful for other FileSender deployments as well”.
FileSender admins see everything or can choose to view statistics for a specific Identity Provider (IdP). Now, if they need to share with the connected organisations their usage at an institutional level, it is possible for known special users – with the newly added ‘tenant admin’ user role – to grant access to the new statistics page. Tenant admins are restricted to seeing only the statistics of the IdP they belong to.
The new statistics page displays the following information (for the last 30 days), presented with graphs and charts: daily transfers and vouchers, daily data size transferred, transfer speeds for encrypted/unencrypted transfers, and the split between encrypted/unencrypted transfers. Additionally, the page includes tables that show: transfers per user (active only), active and expired transfers per user, file types, users who have generated an API key, and other relevant details.
Also, these statistics provide FileSender admins with valuable insights into user activity. For instance, they can easily identify heavy users based on transfer size/frequency or observe trends to determine peak usage times, which aids in planning outages for upgrades/maintenance.
On the back-end, AARNet made a lot of database optimisations (with help from Ben Martin) to ensure the statistics page load at a reasonable speed and to reduce the load on the database back-end.
NII contribution to file forwarding support
NII, the Japanese NREN, contributed to file forwarding support with named endpoints.
This file forwarding feature is a function that asynchronously and quickly forwards uploaded files to another FileSender site. This allows a Federation of FileSender servers to be offered, and files to be transferred closer to the recipient for quicker download.
Upgrading from version 2.x
Download the release on: https://github.com/filesender/filesender/releases/
Follow upgrading instructions from FileSender version 2.x to version 3.x: https://docs.filesender.org/filesender/v3.0/development-upgrade-notes/
Feedback from FileSender users is very much appreciated. You can help improve the next release by submitting your bug reports and feature requests through our GitHub Issue Tracker.
Please see Support and Mailing lists to stay updated on the latest FileSender developments and important news.