FS URLs

PyFilesystem can open a filesystem via an FS URL, which is similar to a URL you might enter in to a browser. FS URLs are useful if you want to specify a filesystem dynamically, such as in a conf file or from the command line.

Format

FS URLs are formatted in the following way:

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

The components are as follows:

  • <protocol> 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://
ftp://will:daffodil@ftp.example.org/private

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

osfs://~/projects
~/projects

Note

The username and passwords fields may not contain a colon (:) or an @ symbol. If you need these symbols they may be percent encoded.

URL Parameters

FS URLs may also be appended with a ? symbol followed by a url-encoded query string. For example:

myprotocol://example.org?key1=value1&key2

The query string would be decoded as {"key1": "value1", "key2": ""}.

Query strings are used to provide additional filesystem-specific information used when opening. See the filesystem documentation for information on what query string parameters are supported.

Opening FS URLS

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')