file_structure

Describe a file hierarchy and mount it in a directory on the file system.

About

This gem was extracted from another project tests for which structures containing files, directories and symlinks had to be easily recreated on the fly.

Though it is useful in the context of testing, file_structure does not make assumptions about what it is being used for and deliberately does not handle things such as temporary file structures or mock file structures.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'file_structure'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install file_structure

Usage

Visit the API documentation for more details.

# Example creating the following file hierarchy:
# /home/john/mydir
# ├── dir1
# │  ├── dir2
# │  │  └── file2 (containing "Hello, World!")
# │  ├── file3
# │  └── link_to_file2 -> /home/john/mydir/dir1/dir2/file2
# └── file1

# Use the DSL to easily describe the structure
fs = FileStructure.build do
  file 'file1'
  directory 'dir1' do
    directory 'dir2' do
      file 'file2', content: 'Hello, World!'
    end
    file 'file3'
    symlink 'link_to_file2', to: 'file2'
  end
end

# Operations on file structures
fs.mount('/home/john/mydir')    # also creates the directory if it doesn't exist
fs.mounted?                     # => true
fs.mountpoint                   # => "/home/john/mydir"
fs.path_for('dir1/file3')       # => "/home/john/mydir/dir1/file3"
fs.unmount                      # deletes all files in /home/john/mydir

Bonus

# Can be mounted in a temporary directory
Dir.mktmpdir do |dirname|
  fs.mount(dirname)
  # do stuff
  fs.unmount
end

# Easily serializable structure (who knows what could be done with this :O)
JSON.dump(fs.structure)

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.