BTFS (bittorrent filesystem)

What is this?

With BTFS, you can mount any .torrent file or magnet link and then use it as any read-only directory in your file tree. The contents of the files will be downloaded on-demand as they are read by applications. Tools like ls, cat and cp works as expected. Applications like vlc and mplayer can also work without changes.

Example usage

$ mkdir mnt
$ btfs video.torrent mnt
$ cd mnt
$ vlc video.mp4

To unmount and shutdown:

$ fusermount -u mnt

Installing on Debian/Ubuntu

# apt-get install btfs

Installing on Arch Linux

# pacman -S btfs

Installing on Gentoo

# emerge -av btfs

Installing on Fedora

# dnf install fuse-btfs

Installing on Fedora OSTree

$ rpm-ostree install fuse-btfs

OpenSUSE

# zypper install btfs

Installing on macOS

Use brew to install on macOS.

$ brew install btfs

Dependencies (on Linux)

• fuse3 ("fuse3" in Ubuntu 22.04)
• libtorrent ("libtorrent-rasterbar8" in Ubuntu 22.04)
• libcurl ("libcurl4" in Ubuntu 22.04)

Building from git on a recent Debian/Ubuntu

$ sudo apt-get install autoconf automake libfuse3-dev libtorrent-rasterbar-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev g++
$ git clone https://github.com/johang/btfs.git btfs
$ cd btfs
$ autoreconf -i
$ ./configure
$ make

And optionally, if you want to install it:

$ make install

Building on macOS

Use brew to get the dependencies.

$ brew install --cask macfuse libtorrent-rasterbar autoconf automake pkg-config
$ git clone https://github.com/johang/btfs.git btfs
$ cd btfs
$ autoreconf -i
$ ./configure
$ make

And optionally, if you want to install it:

$ make install