[erlang-questions] simple virtual file system in Erlang?

[Marco Molteni]

Hello colleagues,

I would like to start from the presentation "Build an FTP Server with Ranch in 30 Minutes" and really build an FTP server, so at a certain point I need to hit the filesystem.

Since the idea is still as a presentation (as opposed to building a production FTP server) I don't want to touch the real filesystem of the host, I want to use a as simple as possible virtual filesystem. It could be backed by DETS or Mnesia for example, or it could stay only in memory.

On the other hand, it must still behave as a filesystem, that is, it must be hierarchical, so a direct mapping to a key/value store would not be enough. In the spirit of simplicity, I don't need any concept of read/write permission, I simply need a sort of graph with two types: inner nodes are directories, leaf nodes are files or empty directories.

I am thinking to use DETS and somehow introduce a very simple intermediate layer that would offer the impression to be in a graph (each non-leaf node a directory) and map it to the DETS key/value API.

Any suggestions?

thanks
marco

[1] https://ninenines.eu/articles/ranch-ftp/