Filemaker Server Linux

If you are looking for information about Filemaker Server Linux then you have come to the right place. We’re going to cover everything we can. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of options for running this software on Linux. It generally supports Windows and MacOS. We’re writing this April 27, 2020.

According to Wikipedia, Filemaker Server used to have a version that ran on Linux. They then choose discontinue this in later editions ( version 7 ). More recently they started providing support for running it on Linux in the cloud. At first this meant that it was an image available only on AWS. It was available from the Amazon Marketplace and used CentOS. This was in 2016. Now it is available directly from Claris ( since late 2019 ). They still run it on AWS but instead of being on the Marketplace you would get it from Claris.

Filemaker Pro Linux

If you are reading this you are probably interested in Filemaker Pro Linux. Things aren’t great but you do have options.

If you want to get this working on Linux one of the options you have is to run it using Wine. You can learn more about that here: Filemaker Pro Linux using Wine

Apparently Filemaker Pro Advance 18 is supposed to work pretty well on Linux using Wine. It has a rating of Silver.

It is actually kind of strange that they don’t want to release the Linux version of the server. They have the software working on Linux since they are using CentOS to run it in the cloud but they only let people use Mac or Windows if they are running it on premise. I would understand if they wanted it to be OSX only since Claris is owned by Apple but I don’t understand why the would allow it to run on Windows and not Linux.

What is Filemaker?

It is basically a combination of a database and GUI. It allows you to construct applications to access data in the database however you want. It is really easy to just generate custom applications. It has actually been around since the 1980s and has a long history. It seems to be a pretty slick project.

Virtual Machines For Filemaker Server Linux

Now there is always the option of just using virtualization. You could just run a Windows or OSX VM on top of Linux. At this point you almost may as well just run it directly on Windows or OSX. The only way this would make sense is if you had a Linux system and you specifically had to get it working on that system using the currently installed OS. At that point, if you just need to get it working you might not mind spinning up a VM and installing Filemaker Server on it.