ramdisk

README

ramdisk 🐏

Convenience wrapper for managing RAM disks across different operating systems with a consistent interface.

Usage

Help screen:

$ ramdisk -h
ramdisk 0.2.1 🐏

Usage:
  ramdisk [options] create [<mount-path>]
  ramdisk destroy <device-path>

Options:
  -h -help      Show this screen.
  -d            Print the resulting device path to stdout.
  -v            Verbose output.
  -size=<mb>    Size in megabytes [default: 32].

Creating a new ram disk with a specified size:

$ device_name=$(ramdisk -size=512 -d create)
512MB ramdisk created as /dev/disk4, mounted at /tmp/ramdisk-325620223
To later remove do: `ramdisk destroy /dev/disk4`
$ echo "${device_name}"
/dev/disk4

Installation

• 📦 Compile via Go toolchain: go get github.com/carterjones/ramdisk/cmd/ramdisk

Platform Support

macOS ✅

Works great and does not require superuser access.

The basic steps followed are:

• Create an unmounted but attached device in RAM that consists of the appropriate number of device blocks via hdiutil.
• Format a new uniquely named HFS+ volume on that device via newfs_hfs.
• Mounts the volume at a uniquely generated path within the /tmp filesystem, via mount.

This normally requires a sequence of arcane commands on the macOS command line which I can never remember, and thus was the primary reason I created this wrapper.

Linux ✅

Things are quite simple and work great via tmpfs on Linux! (But note that most Linux implementations unfortunately requires sudo access to mount new volumes.)

If you prefer a sudo-less route, most modern Linux on kernel 2.6+ often already has /dev/shm mounted, which is memory backed, so you can also just use that without any initialization at all.

Documentation

Index

• Constants
• func Destroy(devicePath string) error
• type LinuxPlatformImplementation
• type Options
• type PlatformImplementation
• type RAMDisk
  • func Create(opts Options) (*RAMDisk, error)

Constants

const (
	DefaultSize = 1 * datasize.MB
)

defaults that are used for any zero value in Options

const Version = "0.2.1"

Version is the semantic version of this package.

Functions

func Destroy

func Destroy(devicePath string) error

Destroy unmounts the ramdisk and removes it from devices.

Types

type LinuxPlatformImplementation

type LinuxPlatformImplementation struct{}

LinuxPlatformImplementation is the implementation for Linux systems.

The Linux implementation likely *requires sudo* to function on most distros. If you want a sudo-less option, you can use /dev/shm instead on most modern Linux platforms.

type Options

type Options struct {
	MountPath string      // optional: fs mount dir  (default: temp directory)
	Size      uint64      // optional: size in bytes (default: DefaultSize)
	Logger    *log.Logger // optional: logger for verbose implementation logs
}

Options are optional values that will override default behavior

type PlatformImplementation

type PlatformImplementation interface {
	// contains filtered or unexported methods
}

PlatformImplementation is the interface that should be implmented on an individual platform (operating system, etc), and hidden behind platform specific build tags.

type RAMDisk

type RAMDisk struct {
	// The system path referring to the RAMDisk. This may or may not be
	// identical to the MountPath, depending on operating system specific
	// implementations.
	DevicePath string
	// The filesystem path where the RAMDisk is mounted and may be viewed.
	MountPath string
}

RAMDisk represents the "results" of a ram disk creation operation

func Create

func Create(opts Options) (*RAMDisk, error)

Create a new ramdisk, using the implementation for the currently active platform.

If you wish to use all default values, supply a zero-value struct.

rd, err := ramdisk.Create(Options{})

May return an error on numerous platform-specific conditions.