DorkFS

Purpose

DorkFS is a versioned, FUSE based file system aiming at the management of large repositories that consist of multiple sources, including Git repositories, Artifactory stores and other backends.

Structure

DorkFS is designed to lazily download needed artifacts as they are accessed through the file system layer. It manages a local workspace that accesses the versioned artifacts in a copy-on-write manner. On commit, the changed objects are stored in the local cache and uploaded to the remote storages.

State

• DorkFS uses the local file system to create the workspace and the local cache.
• A GitHub driver exists so that it is possible to mount Git repositories hosted on github.com or an on-premises installation of GitHub.
• The workspace overlay is working so that you can create and modify the cached files.

Usage

Mounting the file system

DorkFS sets up a local storage and mounts its contents to the given mount point. This is done by calling the dorkfs binary with the "mount" subcommand. This command takes three main arguments: A mount point, a cache directory that contains cached data and intermediate files like the changed files of the workspace, and a URL that points to the git repository that shall be mounted to the mount point. An example call could look like this:

$ dorkfs mount /var/run/dorkcache/dorkfs /mnt/dorkfs \
github+https://github.com/darkwisebear/dorkfs 

See below for a more complete example.

Managing the workspace

DorkFS sets up a special directory called .dork below the given mount point. Inside this directory there is a link to a socket the daemon process listens to. The socket accepts incoming JSON objects and responds with an UTF-8 string that is a status most of the time but it can also be a lot more data, for example in case of the log command.

The data format of the JSON object is subject to change. However, it is kept backwards compatible, so older (minor) versions of dorkfs may talk to newer versions of a daemon process.

Using this interface is done by calling dorkfs with any command except mount. Please check the command line help for a list of available commands.

Examples

Mounting a workspace and committing a file

The following commands

$ dorkfs --uid johndoe --gid johndoe /home/johndoe/dorkcache \
/mnt/dorkfs github+https://api.github.com/darkwisebear/dorktest
$ cd /mnt/dorkfs
$ mkdir testdir
$ cd testdir
$ echo "Hello, world!" > hello_world.txt
$ dorkfs commit -m "This is a VCS hello world example"
$ dorkfs log | less

will give (example):

On branch (HEAD)
Commit: 8812da4fb607d7def1cc738b64b6eb63f941fb7fca16dc8ccb9c0d24987d08af

This is a VCS hello world example


Tree:   3b8556c149d27c98cf8bd4bdf4f7acaebabc529656109e764aa38ee1e5c78104

Known issues

• Currently, no signal handler for SIGTERM is installed. Therefore, unmounting should be done using umount as sending SIGTERM will not be handled properly.