# The Software Heritage Filesystem (SwhFS): Integrating Source Code Archival with Development

Date: 2021-07-27 17:06:14 +08:00Date modified: 2022-06-21 12:11:41 +08:00

- primarily features `swh-fuse`, a utility allowing to mount software from Software Heritage to your local environment quickly

- it is based from POSIX filesystems built with FUSE framework; as such it does not require root privileges to use it

- it exposes the global merkle tree as a filesystem along with its metadata, archive, etc.

- it can interact with the objects in the merkle tree such as the source code files, commits, snapshots, etc.

- the tool is essentially a FUSE adapter to Software Heritage API

- future considerations include for mining software repositories and integrations with Git making commands work inside of the filesystem

features:

- the tool lazily loads the archives to save bandwidth and disk space

- caches for performance especially with how bad remote filesystems can be

- reduces redundancy by using symlinks extensively

## Backlinks

- swh.fuse