Cheryl

The File Manager, Third Time

Ten years after Libra, I wrote a file manager again. December 2013, in the middle of the Crunchbutton years. This one was called Cheryl and lived at cheryl.io, built on PHP 5 and AngularJS with my own Tipsy framework underneath, an Ace editor for editing files in place, and storage that could be the local disk or a database. It had a one-click Heroku deploy button that set up Nginx and Postgres for you.

I keep coming back to file managers: Libra in 2003, then osFileManager, then this. It's a small app that touches everything, so it was a good way to prove out Tipsy.

I first tagged it in October 2014, and it went from v3.0.0 to a v4.0.1 beta in May and June 2016. The beta is where it stayed, and I archived it in January 2018.

Four Point Oh In Four Days

In May 2016 the file manager got three version numbers in a week, v3.0.0 on the 21st, v3.0.2 on the 22nd and v4.0.0 on the 24th, and then v4.0.1 on June 3rd. It still called itself Cheryl 4.0 Beta.

Cheryl was the third generation of a file manager I started in 2003. PHP and AngularJS, an Ace code editor built in so you could edit what you found, storage on local disk or in a database, and a one-click Heroku deploy that set it all up on Nginx and Postgres. That Heroku button is why v4 happened: Heroku's filesystem doesn't stick around, so I had to rethink where the files live.

I started this version in December 2013 and kept chipping away at it. The default login was still admin and password, same as osFileManager thirteen years earlier.

That week I was four months into Agency Enterprise, with Mail Princess and Karma going at the same time. Cheryl was archived in January 2018.