Blixt Documentation v2.9

Quickstart

Mount an Amazon S3 bucket on your own machine with Docker, in about five minutes.

This quickstart uses Amazon S3. The steps are the same for other providers: only the credentials and the bucket scheme change. See Cloud credentials.

You need

  • Docker, on Linux or MacOS
  • An S3 bucket, and AWS credentials that can read and write it in ~/.aws/credentials
  • An NFS client: built into MacOS; sudo apt install nfs-common on Debian and Ubuntu

1. Start BlixtFS

mkdir -p ~/blixt-data

docker run -d --name blixt --privileged \
  -p 127.0.0.1:2049:2049 \
  -v ~/blixt-data:/data \
  -v ~/.aws/credentials:/config/aws/credentials:ro \
  blixtfs/standard:latest \
  --aws_default_region us-east-1 \
  --default_cloud aws s3://YOUR-BUCKET

Replace YOUR-BUCKET with your bucket’s name, and us-east-1 with its region. The container looks for AWS credentials at /config/aws/credentials.

2. Wait for it to be ready

docker logs -f blixt

Once the log shows your bucket being served, press Ctrl+C to stop following it. For a bucket with many objects, the first indexing takes a little longer.

3. Mount it

# Linux
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/blixt
sudo mount -t nfs -o vers=4 127.0.0.1:/ /mnt/blixt
cd /mnt/blixt/aws/YOUR-BUCKET

# MacOS
mkdir -p ~/blixt
sudo mount -t nfs -o vers=4,noresvport 127.0.0.1:/ ~/blixt
cd ~/blixt/aws/YOUR-BUCKET

4. Try it

ls -la
echo "hello from BlixtFS" > hello.txt
cat hello.txt

Now look in the bucket with the AWS CLI. hello.txt is there as an ordinary object:

aws s3 ls s3://YOUR-BUCKET/
aws s3 cp s3://YOUR-BUCKET/hello.txt -

It works the other way too. Upload an object with the AWS CLI and it appears in the mount within a few seconds:

echo "hello from S3" | aws s3 cp - s3://YOUR-BUCKET/from-s3.txt
ls

5. Clean up

cd ~
sudo umount /mnt/blixt        # or ~/blixt on MacOS
docker rm -f blixt
rm -rf ~/blixt-data           # BlixtFS's local state; your bucket is untouched

Next steps