Files FUSE Mount

Expose a user's Nextcloud storage as a filesystem. Every reading & writing operation in this filesystem is controlled by Nextcloud and its filesystem API. This has some key benefits over direct filesystem access:

Shares are working
Flows are properly triggered
No rescan of file changes required

Use cases:

Create a pool of shared media with colleagues and family. Then mount the whole library in some external media player like Jellyfin
Expose a user's storage as a Samba share without worrying about consistency with Nextcloud.
Replace an existing WebDAV mount. Benchmarks are needed, but chances are this solution here will perform a LOT better
Use powerful third-party server tools for processing and organizing data and see changes immediately reflected in Nextcloud

Requirements

Your system needs to be set up for mounting FUSE filesystems: You need the have libfuse-dev and fuse installed.
You need PHP 7.4+ with ext-ffi

Usage

This app has no GUI and probably won't ever need one. For now, it just ships a new CLI command called files:fuse-mount. It supports specifying one or more users and a mount point. For example, to mount a single user directory, run ./occ files:fuse-mount --user john /mnt/nextcloud-fuse/john

You can also pass multiple users. In this case the root of the mount point will contain all individual user folders as subdirectories ./occ files:fuse-mount -u john -u jane /mnt/nextcloud-fuse/john

The command will stay in the foreground as long as the mount is active. To unmount and terminate the process, use fusermount -u <MOUNTPOINT>

Caveats

This a very very rudimentary implementation. It currently supports:

Directory listing
Read operations
Write operations
File deletion

So there is a lot of stuff missing that you might expect:

Polling (Might need to look into PHP8.1 Fibers for this one)
Symlinks (A limited implementation that enables sharing between users could work. Otherwise it just does not make sense to support symlinks)
Integration of common linux concepts like ownership/permissions and locking (where possible, correlating Nextcloud concepts are applied though)

Troubleshooting

Failed loading 'libfuse.so' Make sure your system has the required packages. On Debian for example, you need fuse and libfuse-dev