MagicFS (mafs)

MagicFS is an easy-to-use library that allows anyone to easily create virtual filesystems using FUSE.

MagicFS allows you to redirect file requests, so instead of the request going to an underlying storage medium like a hard drive, the request goes to a program that you've written.

If you like the idea of playing around with virtual filesystems, but have been put off by the complexity of it all, then this library could be for you. You can easily create whole, feature-complete filesystems in just a few lines of code. No need for painstakingly dealing with folder structures and buffers, mafs manages all the low-level details, provides sane defaults, and lets you focus on the functionality.

Installation

MagicFS is available on pypi, and can be easily installed with pip.

$ pip3 install mafs

Examples

All of the examples are listed in examples/. Here's a demo of running the places.py example.

$ mkdir fs
$ python3 examples/places.py fs
$ ls fs
place  shortcut
$ ls fs/place
here  there
$ cat fs/place/here
this is here
$ cat fs/place/there
this is there
$ cat fs/place/anywhere
this is anywhere!
$ fusermount -u fs

Development

To download MagicFS for development, execute the following commands:

$ git clone https://github.com/jedevc/mafs.git
$ cd mafs
$ pip3 install -r requirements.txt

To launch mafs with an example, execute the following:

$ PYTHONPATH=. python3 examples/places.py fs -fg

Note the use of the PYTHONPATH environment variable to include the library, and the use of the -fg flag to run mafs in the foreground for easier debugging.

Tests

To run the tests for MagicFS, install nose, and then use it to run the tests.

$ pip install nose
$ nosetests

If you make any changes, please run the tests before you commit to ensure that you haven't broken anything.