FileConvert anything.
On metal you can see.
FileForge is a self-hosted converter for images, audio, video, documents, and archives. Hammered out on dedicated metal. No tracking, no third-party SaaS in the conversion path. Your file, forged.
Every conversion runs in a read-only Docker container with no network egress, dropped capabilities, and a tmpfs scratch disk.
Workers live on Proxmox hosts you can see and touch. No third-party SaaS in the conversion path — just sharp, ffmpeg, libreoffice, and 7z.
No analytics SDKs, no ad scripts, no third-party JS in the convert flow. Output metadata is stripped by default.
Step into the workshop.
Three views from inside FileForge — the dashboard, the convert flow, and the history log. No staged demo data, this is the actual app.
Workshop overview
Daily quota, tier limits, and your last few jobs at a glance.
Three-step convert flow
Pick a file, choose a target and preset, watch it forge. Live progress, presigned download.
Live history
Polling refresh, filterable by status and format. Cancel running jobs, retry failed ones.
Why not CloudConvert?
The big online converters are convenient, but they upload your file to a fleet of shared workers run by someone else, log every byte, and bolt analytics on top. FileForge runs on hardware in a closet you could walk to.
- Private MinIO behind a LAN-only firewall — no public bucket.
- Workers can't reach the internet — they only talk to MinIO + the API.
- EXIF, ID3, and document metadata stripped by default. Pro can opt in.
Stack you can audit
image-worker → sharp + libvips + ImageMagick + dcraw audio-worker → ffmpeg + sox video-worker → ffmpeg + NVENC document → libreoffice + pandoc + qpdf archive → 7z, unrar, tar, zip
One container per format. Concurrency = 1. Scale by replica count.
Security questions, answered.
Where do my files actually go?
Uploads PUT directly to a private MinIO instance on the hub host. The API never sees the bytes — it only signs URLs. Files auto-delete after 24 hours (Free) or 7 days (Forge Pro).
How do you stop malware getting through?
Every upload is magic-byte checked, then streamed through ClamAV before the worker ever touches it. Failures are quarantined; the file is deleted and the conversion is marked as failed.
Can I use the API without the web app?
Yes — Forge Pro mints personal ff_live_… keys you manage in Settings → API Keys. Hit /v1/* directly with curl, Node, or Python; CORS is disabled on that surface so keys don't leak from front-end JS. Read the API docs
What about documents and archives?
Documents (PDF, DOCX, ODT, RTF, TXT, HTML, MD) round-trip via LibreOffice and pandoc; spreadsheets and presentations export to PDF. Archives (ZIP, 7z, TAR, TAR.GZ, RAR-read) get repackaged with a zip-bomb cap on extraction.