gcsfuse is a user-space file system for interacting with Google Cloud Storage.
Please treat gcsfuse as beta-quality software. Use it for whatever you like, but be aware that bugs may lurk, and that we reserve the right to make small backwards-incompatible changes.
The careful user should be sure to read semantics.md for information on how gcsfuse maps file system operations to GCS operations, and especially on surprising behaviors. The list of open issues may also be of interest.
See installing.md for full installation instructions. The summary is that if you already have Go, fuse, and Git installed, you need only run:
go get github.com/googlecloudplatform/gcsfuse
This will fetch the gcsfuse sources, build them, and install a binary named
gcsfuse
to $GOPATH/bin
. If you ever need to update to the latest version of
gcsfuse, you can do so with:
go get -u github.com/googlecloudplatform/gcsfuse
Before invoking gcsfuse, you must have a GCS bucket that you want to mount. If your bucket doesn't yet exist, create one using the Google Developers Console.
To mount a bucket using gcsfuse, invoke it like this:
gcsfuse my-bucket /path/to/mount/point
The directory onto which you are mounting the file system
(/path/to/mount/point
in the above example) must already exist.
The gcsfuse tool will run until the file system is unmounted. By default little
is printed, but you can use the --fuse.debug
flag to turn on debugging output
to stderr. If the tool should happen to crash, crash logs will also be written
to stderr.
If you are mounting a bucket that was populated with objects by some other means
besides gcsfuse, you may be interested in the --implicit_dirs
flag. See the
notes in semantics.md for more information.
See mounting.md for more detail, including notes on running as a daemon and fstab compatiblity.
By default, gcsfuse uses two forms of caching to save round trips to GCS, at the
cost of consistency guarantees. These caching behaviors can be controlled with
the flags --stat_cache_ttl
and --type_cache_ttl
. See
semantics.md for more information.
Behind the scenes, when a newly-opened file is first read or modified, gcsfuse
downloads the entire backing object's contents from GCS. (Unless it is a
newly-created file, of course.) The contents are stored in a local temporary
file whose location is controlled by the flag --temp_dir
and whose size is
controlled with --temp_dir_limit
, which is used to serve reads and
modifications. Later, when the file is closed or fsync'd, gcsfuse writes the
contents of the local file back to GCS as a new object generation.
The consequence of this is that gcsfuse is relatively efficient when reading or writing entire large files, but will not be particularly fast for small numbers of random reads or writes within larger files. Performance when copying large files into GCS is comparable to gsutil (see issue #22 for testing notes). There is some overhead due to the staging of data in a local temporary file, as discussed above.
If you would like to rate limit traffic to/from GCS in order to set limits on your GCS spending on behalf of gcsfuse, you can do so:
- The flag
--op_rate_limit_hz
controls the rate at which gcsfuse will send requests to GCS. - The flag
--egress_bandwidth_limit_bytes_per_second
controls the egress bandwidth from gcsfuse to GCS.
All rate limiting is approximate, and is performed over a 30-second window. Rate limiting is disabled by default.
If you notice otherwise unreasonable performance, please file an issue.
# Supportgcsfuse is open source software, released under the Apache license.
It is distributed as-is, without warranties or conditions of any kind. Best
effort community support is available on StackExchange with the
google-cloud-platform
and google-cloud-storage
tags. Please be sure to look
at previous questions and answers before asking a new one. For bugs and
feature requests, please file an issue.