Overview

bindfs - https://bindfs.org/

bindfs is a FUSE filesystem for mirroring a directory to another directory, similarly to mount --bind. The permissions of the mirrored directory can be altered in various ways.

Some things bindfs can be used for:

• Making a directory read-only.
• Making all executables non-executable.
• Sharing a directory with a list of users (or groups).
• Modifying permission bits using rules with chmod-like syntax.
• Changing the permissions with which files are created.

Non-root users can use almost all features, but most interesting use-cases need user_allow_other to be defined in /etc/fuse.conf.

Installation

FUSE 2.8.0 or above is required. FUSE 3 is supported. When using FUSE 3, libfuse 3.10.2 or newer is recommended to avoid a bug with readdir, though it only seems to affect a few applications.

To compile from source on Linux, first apt install build-essential pkg-config libfuse3-dev (or libfuse-dev on older systems). On MacOS, install XCode (and let it install Developer Tools), pkg-config and either MacFuse or fuse-t.

Download a release or clone this repository.

Then compile and install as usual:

./autogen.sh  # Only needed if you cloned the repo.
./configure
make
make install

If you want the mounts made by non-root users to be visible to other users, you may have to add the line user_allow_other to /etc/fuse.conf.

On some systems, you may have to add your user to the fuse group.

Usage

See the bindfs --help or the man-page for instructions and examples.

MacOS note

The following extra options may be useful under osxfuse:

-o local,allow_other,extended_security,noappledouble

See https://github.com/osxfuse/osxfuse/wiki/Mount-options for details.

Test suite

Bindfs comes with a (somewhat brittle and messy) test suite. Some tests must be run as root, and some tests only work as non-root.

You can run run the tests with ./test-all.sh. It requires Ruby and sudo, and it uses valgrind if installed.

Vagrant test runner

There is also a set of Vagrant configs for running the test suite on a variety of systems. Run them with vagrant/test.rb (add --help for extra options).

You can destroy all bindfs Vagrant machines (but not the downloaded images) with make vagrant-clean.

License

GNU General Public License version 2 or any later version. See the file COPYING.