FileSender: powered by global collaboration between NRENs

FileSender 3.0 was released on December 18, 2025, after more than a year of field testing. This highly anticipated release features an enhanced user interface (UI), statistics page updates, file forwarding support, and optional initial OpenPGP support for guests. These improvements make FileSender more accessible, efficient, and user-friendly, increasing user satisfaction and strengthening its wider adoption, particularly within R&E communities where secure large-file sharing is crucial. The FileSender open-source project has been developed and improved collaboratively since its inception in 2009. It is a truly international joint effort, achieved through the persistent hard work and dedication of all involved. We are grateful to the global NREN community for their continued support of FileSender. 

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 on 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 was essential to make the transition from the 2.x series as simple as possible for administrators and ensure that everything goes smoothly. 

“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.”  – Jan Meijer, Chair of the FileSender Board, Senior Advisor for International Strategy, Sikt (Norway)

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. 

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. 

RNP, the Brazilian NREN, has played a major role in implementing the new UI by offering extensive support. From a technical perspective, the RNP software developers team worked on creating new UI components, custom themes, and a redesigned screen structure. 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. 

“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.” – Sérgio Leal Fonseca, Head of Solutions Architecture, RNP (Brazil)

AARNet, the Australian NREN, contributed to updating the statistics page, available only in the 3.x series. 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. 

“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.”  – Michael D’Silva, Site Reliability & Software Engineer, AARNet (Australia)

NII, the Japanese NREN, contributed file forwarding support with named endpoints – a feature that asynchronously and quickly forwards uploaded files to another FileSender site. This allows exploring the concept of a federation of FileSender servers. It links NREN FileSender services into a data movement infrastructure, making it easier for researchers to transfer data between storage and processing. Files can also be sent closer to the recipient for faster downloads. 

The number of countries where the FileSender service is provided to the corresponding national R&E communities is growing, with 54 NRENs now. We also see an increase in the deployed footprint of the FileSender software in non-NREN organisations, such as government entities, municipalities, universities, medical institutions, private manufacturers, high-tech and IT companies. 

The new UI represents a significant step in keeping FileSender relevant for its large user base. Security hardening will be the next priority on the roadmap, a key topic at the FileSender annual gathering at TNC26! 

Visit the FileSender official website filesender.org