Introduction

go-libzfs currently implements basic manipulation of ZFS pools and data sets. Plan is to add more in further development, improve documentation with more examples, and add more tests. go-libzfs use libzfs C library and does not wrap OpenZFS CLI tools. That way it ensure best performance. Per my personal opinion its more reliable way to do it, and that libzfs is less subject of possible changes then CLI tools. Goal is to let easy using and manipulating OpenZFS form with in go, and tries to map libzfs C library in to go style package respecting golang common practice.

Fork status

This has now been superseded by GoZFS. I'm focusing my efforts there.

This fork has two main features that are not part of the original repository

Compatible with ZFSOnLinux 0.7+
Much better error handling using a custom type which exposes errno information This also has some additioanl fixes when I saw issues in for my use cases.

Upstream seems to only maintain support for an older version of libzfs (which at least in ZOL doesn't work with any recent versions), so I've decided to maintain my own fork. I'm accepting PRs on this fork, so if you want to contribute you're welcome :)

Thanks to everyone who worked on the original repository.

Main features

Creating, destroying, importing and exporting pools.
Reading and modifying pool properties.
Creating, destroying and renaming of filesystem datasets and volumes.
Creating, destroying and rollback of snapshots.
Cloning datasets and volumes.
Reading and modifying dataset and volume properties.

Requirements:

ZFSOnLinux 0.7+ and libzfs with development headers installed.

Installing

go get github.com/lorenz/go-libzfs

Testing

# On command line shell run
cd $GOPATH/src/github.com/lorenz/go-libzfs
go test

Usage example

// Create map to represent ZFS dataset properties. This is equivalent to
// list of properties you can get from ZFS CLI tool, and some more
// internally used by libzfs.
props := make(map[ZFSProp]Property)

// I choose to create (block) volume 1GiB in size. Size is just ZFS dataset
// property and this is done as map of strings. So, You have to either
// specify size as base 10 number in string, or use strconv package or
// similar to convert in to string (base 10) from numeric type.
strSize := "1073741824"

props[DatasetPropVolsize] = Property{Value: strSize}
// In addition I explicitly choose some more properties to be set.
props[DatasetPropVolblocksize] = Property{Value: "4096"}
props[DatasetPropReservation] = Property{Value: strSize}

// Lets create desired volume
d, err := DatasetCreate("TESTPOOL/VOLUME1", DatasetTypeVolume, props)if err != nil {
	println(err.Error())
	return
}
// Dataset have to be closed for memory cleanup
defer d.Close()

println("Created zfs volume TESTPOOL/VOLUME1")

Special thanks to

Bicom Systems for supporting this little project and that way making it possible.
OpenZFS as the main ZFS software collective.