kbfs/

README

Keybase Filesystem (KBFS)

This repository contains the official Keybase implementation of the client-side code for the Keybase filesystem (KBFS). See the KBFS documentation for an introduction and overview.

All code is written in the Go Language, and relies on the Keybase service.

Architecture

This client allows you to mount KBFS as a proper filesystem at some mountpoint on your local device (by default, /keybase/). It communicates locally with the Keybase service, and remotely with three types of KBFS servers (block servers, metadata servers, and key servers).

The code is organized as follows:

• cache: Generic cache data structures.
• data: Data structures and logic for KBFS file and directory data.
• dokan: Helper code for running Dokan filesystems on Windows.
• env: Code to implement libkbfs.Context in terms of libkb.
• favorites: Data structures for the favorited lists of top-level folders (TLFs) that appear under private/, public/, and team/.
• fsrpc: RPC interfaces that connected clients can call in KBFS, to do certain operations, such as listing files.
• idutil: Basic data structures, interfaces, and helper code for dealing with identity data for users and teams.
• ioutil: Helper functions for I/O.
• kbfsblock: Types and functions to work with KBFS blocks.
• kbfscodec: Interfaces and types used for serialization in KBFS.
• kbfscrypto: KBFS-specific cryptographic types and functions.
• kbfsdokan: The main executable for running KBFS on Windows.
• kbfsfuse: The main executable for running KBFS on Linux and OS X.
• kbfsgit: The main executable for the Keybase git remote helper.
• kbfshash: An implementation of the KBFS hash spec.
• kbfsmd: Types and functions to work with KBFS TLF metadata.
• kbfssync: KBFS-specific synchronization primitives.
• kbfstool: A thin command line utility for interacting with KBFS without using a filesystem mountpoint.
• kbpagesconfig: Configuration code for Keybase Pages.
• kbpagesd: The main executable for Keybase Pages.
• libcontext: KBFS-specific levelDB utility code.
• libcontext: KBFS-specific context helper code.
• libdokan: Library code gluing together KBFS and the Dokan protocol.
• libfs: Common library code useful to any filesystem presentation layer for KBFS.
• libfuse: Library code gluing together KBFS and the FUSE protocol.
• libgit: Library for git-related logic.
• libhttpserver: Library for serving KBFS files with a local HTTP server.
• libkey: Library for managing KBFS server keys and key metadata.
• libkbfs: The core logic for KBFS.
• libmime: Library for determining the MIME types of KBFS files.
• libpages: Library for the logic behind Keybase Pages.
• metricsutil: Helper code for collecting metrics.
• redirector: The executable that redirects user FUSe requests to the correct user KBFS mount. The redirector is usually mounted at /keybase on Linux and macOS.
• simplefs: A simple RPC-based interface to KBFS.
• stderrutils: A simple library for dealing with stderr on different platforms.
• sysutils: Library for dealing with platform-specific systems stuff.
• test: A test harness with a domain-specific test language and tests in that language.
• tlf: Code and structures for top-level folders (TLFs).
• tlfhandle: The data structure for "Handles" to top-level folders (TLFs), which represent an identifier for each TLF, containing all the user or team IDs associated with the it.

Status

KBFS currently works on both Linux (at least Debian, Ubuntu and Arch), OS X, and Windows. It is approaching release ready, though currently it is still in alpha. There may still be bugs, so please keep backups of any important data you store in KBFS. Currently our pre-built packages are available by invitation only.

KBFS depends in part on the following awesome technologies to present a mountpoint on your device:

• FUSE (on Linux)
• FUSE for OS X (on OS X)
• Dokany (on Windows)

See our vendor directory for a complete list of open source packages KBFS uses.

Currently, our server implementations are not open source.

To run from source against production KBFS servers

On Linux or OS X:

Prerequisites:

• Go 1.15 or higher.
• A running Keybase client service (see instructions).
• On OS X, you may have to install FUSE yourself.
  • You may need to pass the --use-system-fuse flag to kbfsfuse if you install FUSE yourself.
• Then, mount KBFS at /keybase/ as follows:

    cd kbfsfuse
    go install
    mkdir -p /keybase && sudo chown $USER /keybase
    KEYBASE_RUN_MODE=prod kbfsfuse /keybase

Note that our pre-built packages for OS X include a branded version of FUSE for OS X, to ensure that it doesn't conflict with other local FUSE installations. It is still open source -- see here to see how we build it.

On Windows:

See our kbfsdokan documentation.

On FreeBSD:

There are instructions for getting KBFS running on FreeBSD here. This is a user-supported effort, which is not officially supported by the Keybase team at the moment.

To run from source against local in-memory servers

kbfsfuse -bserver=memory -mdserver=memory -localuser strib /keybase

(Use -bserver=dir:/path/to/dir and -mdserver=dir:/path/to/dir if instead you want to save your data to local disk.)

Now you can do cool stuff like:

ls /keybase/private/strib
echo blahblah > /keybase/private/strib/foo
ls /keybase/private/strib,max

(Note that "localuser" mode has only four hard-coded users to play with: "strib", "max", "chris", and "fred".)

Code style

We require all code to pass gofmt and govet. You can install our precommit hooks to make sure your code passes gofmt and govet:

go get golang.org/x/tools/cmd/vet
ln -s $GOPATH/src/github.com/keybase/client/git-hooks/pre-commit $GOPATH/src/github.com/keybase/client/go/kbfs/.git/hooks/pre-commit

Though it doesn't happen automatically, we also expect your code to be as "lint-free" as possible. Running golangci-lint is easy:

golangci-lint --deadline 15m

Vendoring

KBFS vendors all of its dependencies into the local vendor directory. To add or update dependencies, use the govendor tool, as follows:

go install github.com/kardianos/govendor
govendor add github.com/foo/bar  # or `govendor update`
git add --all vendor

Testing

From kbfs/:

go test -i ./...  # install dependencies
go test ./...     # run tests

If you change anything in interfaces.go, you will have to regenerate the mock interfaces used by the tests (make sure you have mockgen installed):

cd libkbfs
./gen_mocks.sh

(Right now the mocks are checked into the repo; this isn't ideal and we should probably change it.)

Licensing

Most code is released under the New BSD (3 Clause) License. If subdirectories include a different license, that license applies instead. (Specifically, dokan/dokan_header and most subdirectories in vendor are released under their own licenses.)