4 title: "Mounting Keep as a filesystem"
7 This tutoral describes how to access Arvados collections using traditional filesystem tools by mounting Keep as a read-only file system using @arv-mount@.
9 {% include 'tutorial_expectations' %}
13 @arv-mount@ provides several features:
15 * You can browse, open and read Keep entries as if they are regular files.
16 * It is easy for existing tools to access files in Keep.
17 * Data is downloaded on demand. It is not necessary to download an entire file or collection to start processing.
19 The default mode permits browsing any collection in Arvados as a subdirectory under the mount directory. To avoid having to fetch a potentially large list of all collections, collection directories only come into existence when explicitly accessed by their Keep locator. For instance, a collection may be found by its content hash in the @keep/by_id@ directory.
22 <pre><code>~$ <span class="userinput">mkdir -p keep</span>
23 ~$ <span class="userinput">arv-mount keep</span>
24 ~$ <span class="userinput">cd keep/by_id/c1bad4b39ca5a924e481008009d94e32+210</span>
25 ~/keep/by_id/c1bad4b39ca5a924e481008009d94e32+210$ <span class="userinput">ls</span>
26 var-GS000016015-ASM.tsv.bz2
27 ~/keep/by_id/c1bad4b39ca5a924e481008009d94e32+210$ <span class="userinput">md5sum var-GS000016015-ASM.tsv.bz2</span>
28 44b8ae3fde7a8a88d2f7ebd237625b4f var-GS000016015-ASM.tsv.bz2
29 ~/keep/by_id/c1bad4b39ca5a924e481008009d94e32+210$ <span class="userinput">cd ../..</span>
30 ~$ <span class="userinput">fusermount -u keep</span>
34 The last line unmounts Keep. Subdirectories will no longer be accessible.
36 Within each directory on Keep, there is a @.arvados#collection@ file that does not show up with @ls@. Its contents include, for instance, the @portable_data_hash@, which is the same as the Keep locator.