Netatalk - Free and Open Source AFP File Server

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About Netatalk

Netatalk is a Free and Open Source file server suite for Unix-like operating
systems that implements the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) over TCP/IP and
AppleTalk. AFP is the native file sharing protocol on Apple II, Classic Mac OS,
early Mac OS X, as well as one of several natively supported protocols on macOS.
Netatalk is also compatible with many 3rd party AFP clients, including GNOME
Files (Nautilus), afpfs-ng and afp-perl.

Why Should I Use Netatalk?

A Netatalk AFP file server is highly performant, feature rich, and interoperable
with AFP clients by Apple and 3rd parties. While the technology originated with
the Apple ecosystem, it can serve as a general purpose file sharing solution for
any Unix-like environment.

A Netatalk AFP server allows you to share, collaborate on, and back up files
remotely. The latest macOS at the time of writing (macOS 26 Tahoe) comes with a
built-in AFP client, so Netatalk can act as a seamless bridge between new and
old Macs, and 3rd party AFP clients.

Compared to common file transfer protocols like NFS and FTP, Netatalk delivers a
Mac-like user experience, with seamless integration of Mac filesystem metadata,
such as the resource forks that were common before Mac OS X. Modern macOS
features such as Zeroconf (Bonjour) service discovery, Time Machine backups, and
Spotlight indexed search are also supported.

Compared to Samba (SMB), Netatalk has demonstrably faster transfer speeds and
advanced caching that allows for seamless browsing of remote file systems.

AppleTalk

Netatalk supports the AppleTalk family of protocols, including the DDP transport
layer for AFP file sharing with very old Macs or Apple II computers.

In addition, a print server, time server, MacIP gateway bridge, and Apple II
netboot server are also provided.

All versions of Netatalk except the 3.x release series can speak AppleTalk.
However, your host OS must supply an AppleTalk networking stack to be able to
use this feature. Please read the AppleTalk chapter in the manual for more
information.

Documentation

To aid in your installation and configuration of Netatalk, a comprehensive
manual is published on the project website.

Additionally, each Netatalk program and configuration file also has a man page
which can be accessed on the command line, f.e. man afpd.

The living Netatalk knowledge base containts getting started guides,
troubleshooting guides, FAQs and other helpful technical documentation..

Community

Netatalk developers and users can be found in online communal spaces like
TinkerDifferent or 68kmla. You can head over there if you want to ask for help
or share your Netatalk stories.

There is also an official Netatalk Discussions board on GitHub which is the best
place to ask for technical assistance.

Finally, the traditional place where Netatalk developers and users interact with
each other is the netatalk-admins mailing list. While the mailing list isn't as
active as it used to be, the list archives are a veritable treasure trove of
decades of Mac networking know-how.

Installation

Many Free and Open Source OS distributions and independent package repositories
ship a Netatalk binary package. Check package availability on Repology.

To get started with building Netatalk from source code, the Installation Quick
Start is a good starting point.

Container deployments

Netatalk is distributed as a container image and can be deployed with
containerization engines such as Docker or Podman.

Read the container readme for more information.

Administrative GUI

A Webmin module for Netatalk is available, used for configuring and operating
the Netatalk daemons through a convenient web interface.

See the Webmin module readme for instructions how to install and get started
with the module. or this overview of the module's feature set.

Contributions

Bug reports and feature requests should be filed as GitHub issue tickets.

Before contributing code to the project, please read the Contributing guidelines
for the coding and collaboration conventions used by this project.

PRs are automatically picked up by GitHub CI, which runs the builds, integration
tests, as well as static analysis scan on SonarCloud (the latter only for PRs
created by project members.)

Security

See the Security Policy for a breakdown of Netatalk version supported with
security patches, our security vulnerability reporting guidelines, as well as
the full record of historical security advisories.

We would love to hear from you if you think you found a security vulnerability
in Netatalk. Please read the above policy and then file a security issue ticket
with us. We promise to follow up with you as soon as possible.

Hosting

This project is currently hosted on GitHub. This is not ideal; the GitHub
platform itself is a proprietary system that is not Free and Open Souce Software
(FOSS). We are deeply concerned about the long term sustainability of using a
proprietary system like GitHub to develop our FOSS project.

We have an open ticket on our GitLab mirror for project members and volunteers
to discuss hosting options.

If you are a contributor who prefer to not use GitHub, please see the Developer
FAQ for instructions on how to create and submit patches without using GitHub
directly.

License and Copyright

The netatalk software package is distributed under the GNU General Public
License v2. However, individual source files or modules may be covered by other
open source licenses. Refer to the headers of each source file, or the
copyright/license notice in a module subdir.

Any use of this project's code to train commercial large language models was
done without permission by this project's contributors. We protest the use of
our code in a way that goes against the word and spirit of our open source
licenses.
