CockroachFUSE is a FUSE filesystem backed by CockroachDB.
The project is intended to provide the highest quality development environment possible for developing CockroachDB. Why develop CockroachDB on a normal filesystem when you can develop CockroachDB on a filesystem that stores everything in CockroachDB? This ensures that your source files remain consistent and highly-available at all times, so that you as a developer never need to stop improving the database. In the future we expect that all CockroachDB binaries will be compiled on CockroachFUSE, promising a level of polish and reliability unheard of in modern day executables.
A working FUSE filesystem consists of three parts:
- The kernel driver that registers as a filesystem and forwards operations into a communication channel to a userspace process that handles them.
- The userspace library (libfuse) that helps the userspace process to establish and run communication with the kernel driver.
- The userspace implementation that actually processes the filesystem operations.
The kernel driver is provided by the FUSE project. The libfuse userspace library used by CockroachFUSE is rust-fuse.
To run mount to a FUSE filesystem, the target system needs FUSE (OSXFUSE on macOS) to be properly installed (i.e. kernel driver and libraries. Some platforms may also require userland utils like fusermount). A default installation of package fuse on Linux, fusefs-libs on FreeBSD, or OSXFUSE on macOS is usually sufficient.
To build, the host system needs FUSE libraries and headers installed. On Linux, the header package is usually called libfuse-dev. On FreeBSD and macOS, fusefs-libs/OSXFUSE installs everything that's needed. The build process also requires pkg-config to locate headers and libraries.
Once a FUSE kernel driver is installed, follow these steps to run a CockroachFUSE filesystem.
# Clone the cockroach-fuse git repository
git clone https://github.com/nvanbenschoten/cockroach-fuse.git
cd cockroach_fuse
# Start a CockroachDB instance
cockroach start --insecure --background
cockroach sql --insecure -e 'CREATE DATABASE cockroachfs'
# Start the filesystem
mkdir mount
cargo run -- --mountpoint=mount
Getting a CockroachDB development environment working on this filesystem is easy. Just follow these steps.
# Clone CockroachDB
cd mount
git clone https://github.com/cockroachdb/cockroach.git
# Build CockroachDB
cd cockroach
make build