Usage

Bazil uses a per-user daemon, and communicates with it over UNIX domain sockets.

Our examples use two computers, squirrel being a desktop computer and pocketgopher a laptop.

The daemon is not yet automatically started, so the first step is to start it. This will go away later.

squirrel$ bazil server run &

pocketgopher$ bazil server run &

Creating a volume

Bazil organizes your files by volume. Let's create our first volume:

squirrel$ bazil volume create mascots

As Bazil is a file system, we need to mount it, to attach it to the directory tree. We'll use a different name for the volume and mountpoint for readability.

squirrel$ mkdir pics
squirrel$ bazil volume mount mascots pics

And now you can use the mount:

squirrel$ cd pics
squirrel$ wget http://blog.golang.org/gopher/gopher.png

You can archive a snapshot of the volume by just naming it:

squirrel$ mkdir .snap/justincase

You can later access the snapshot by just browsing .snap/justincase.

Once you're done with the volume, unmount it safely with:

# can't be inside the mount, or it'll stay busy
squirrel$ cd

# Linux
squirrel$ fusermount -u pics

# OS X
squirrel$ umount pics

Adding a peer

To share volumes with another computer, we need to add it as a peer. The arguments to bazil peer add are NAME and DIALER ARGS.... NAME is just a way to refer to this peer. DIALER selects the communication mechanism.

pocketgopher$ bazil peer add desktop ssh squirrel.example.com

The ssh dialer

The ssh dialer will use your SSH authorization (agent, keys and passphrase, as needed) to connect to the given hostname, and talks to the Bazil server there. It adds the remote as a peer to your local instance, and the local instance as a peer to the remote (with no way to dial back configured, yet).

Sharing volumes

Once you have a peer configured, you can create a new local volume that is synchronized with a volume on the peer. Because our communication mechanism is ssh, we don't need the peer to grant us permission; we're running commands on the remote computer already, with access to the relevant files.

The usage is bazil volume link PEER/VOLUME [NEWVOLUME]

pocketgopher$ bazil volume link desktop/mascots mascots

Offline use

To make file content available locally, without the network connection, we pin the data.

pocketgopher$ mkdir pics
pocketgopher$ bazil volume mount mascots pics
pocketgopher$ cd pics
pocketgopher$ bazil pin .

Pinning just expresses a wish. To make sure the files have actually copied, we need to wait:

pocketgopher$ bazil sync wait

Storage locations

Usage is bazil volume store VOLUME add NAME DIALER ARGS..

TODO I'm not 100% happy with this command line; this may end up happening via editing a file instead.

squirrel$ bazil volume store mascots add goog google-cloud-storage gs://mahbukkit/

TODO talk about data dispersion policies here

Multiple Bazil instances

By default, configuration and file data are stored in platform-specific user data directories: ~/.local/share/bazil/ on many unixes, ~/Library/Application Support/bazil on OS X.

The bulk file data can be moved around later, but this directory is used as the starting point. If you want to use multiple Bazil data stores, with completely separate volumes – for example, to test a new build before using it for real – use

$ bazil -data-dir=PATH ...