FS URLs

PyFilesystem can open filesystems via a FS URL, which are similar to the URLs you might enter in to a browser.

Using FS URLs can be useful if you want to be able to specify a filesystem dynamically, in a conf file (for instance).

FS URLs are parsed in to the following format:

<type>://<username>:<password>@<resource>

The components are as follows:

  • <type> Identifies the type of filesystem to create. e.g. osfs, ftp.
  • <username> Optional username.
  • <password> Optional password.
  • <resource> A resource, which may be a domain, path, or both.

Here are a few examples:

osfs://~/projects
osfs://c://system32
ftp://ftp.example.org/pub
mem://

If <type> is not specified then it is assumed to be an OSFS. The following FS URLs are equivalent:

osfs://~/projects
~/projects

To open a filesysem with a FS URL, you can use open_fs(), which may be imported and used as follows:

from fs import open_fs
projects_fs = open_fs('osfs://~/projects')