Rust FUSE - Filesystem in Userspace

About

fuse-rs is a Rust library crate for easy implementation of FUSE filesystems in userspace.

fuse-rs does not just provide bindings, it is a rewrite of the original FUSE C library to fully take advantage of Rust's architecture.

Documentation

Crate documentation

Details

A working FUSE filesystem consists of three parts:

1. The kernel driver that registers as a filesystem and forwards operations into a communication channel to a userspace process that handles them.
2. The userspace library (libfuse) that helps the userspace process to establish and run communication with the kernel driver.
3. The userspace implementation that actually processes the filesystem operations.

The kernel driver is provided by the FUSE project, the userspace implementation needs to be provided by the developer. fuse-rs provides a replacement for the libfuse userspace library between these two. This way, a developer can fully take advantage of the Rust type interface and runtime features when building a FUSE filesystem in Rust.

Except for a single setup (mount) function call and a final teardown (unmount) function call to libfuse, everything runs in Rust.

Dependencies

FUSE must be installed to build or run programs that use fuse-rs (i.e. kernel driver and libraries. Some platforms may also require userland utils like fusermount). A default installation of FUSE is usually sufficient.

To build fuse-rs or any program that depends on it, pkg-config needs to be installed as well.

Linux

FUSE for Linux is available in most Linux distributions and usually called fuse. To install on a Debian based system:

sudo apt-get install fuse

Install on CentOS:

sudo yum install fuse

To build, FUSE libraries and headers are required. The package is usually called libfuse-dev or fuse-devel. Also pkg-config is required for locating libraries and headers.

sudo apt-get install libfuse-dev pkg-config

sudo yum install fuse-devel pkgconfig

macOS

Installer packages can be downloaded from the FUSE for macOS homepage.

To install using Homebrew:

brew cask install osxfuse

To install pkg-config (required for building only):

brew install pkg-config

FreeBSD

Install packages fusefs-libs and pkgconf.

pkg install fusefs-libs pkgconf

Usage

Put this in your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
fuse = "0.4"

To create a new filesystem, implement the trait fuse::Filesystem. See the documentation for details or the examples directory for some basic examples.

To Do

There's still a lot of stuff to be done. Feel free to contribute. See the list of issues on GitHub and search the source files for comments containing "TODO" or "FIXME" to see what's still missing.

Compatibility

Developed and tested on macOS. Tested under Linux, macOS and FreeBSD using stable, beta and nightly Rust versions (see CI for details).

Contribution

Fork, hack, submit pull request. Make sure to make it useful for the target audience, keep the project's philosophy and Rust coding standards in mind. For larger or essential changes, you may want to open an issue for discussion first. Also remember to update the Changelog if your changes are relevant to the users.