Installation

Requirements

Python 3.9 or newer.
git-annex, as for DataLad itself. Install it with your system’s package manager (e.g. sudo apt-get install git-annex on Debian/Ubuntu, brew install git-annex on macOS), from conda-forge (conda install -c conda-forge git-annex), or into your Python environment with pip install git-annex. The DataLad Handbook covers more options.
FUSE, only for mounting datasets with datalad fusefs. The fusepy bindings used by datalad-fuse need the FUSE 2 library (libfuse.so.2), plus the fusermount helper, which FUSE 3 also provides. Recent Debian and Ubuntu releases come with FUSE 3 only; add the FUSE 2 library to it, keeping FUSE 3 installed:
- Debian 13 (trixie), Ubuntu 24.04 and newer:
```
sudo apt-get install fuse3 libfuse2t64
```
- Debian 12 (bookworm), Ubuntu 22.04:
```
sudo apt-get install fuse3 libfuse2
```
- older releases:
```
sudo apt-get install fuse
```
On these releases, installing the fuse package instead would remove fuse3, and with it possibly other packages that depend on it.

FUSE mounts are developed and tested on Linux. Opening files from Python (see Python usage) and datalad fsspec-head do not need FUSE at all.

Installing datalad-fuse

Install the latest release from PyPI with pip; DataLad, fsspec and the other Python dependencies are installed along with it:

$ python3 -m pip install datalad-fuse

To install the development version, which may include features that are not released yet:

$ python3 -m pip install git+https://github.com/datalad/datalad-fuse.git

Optional backends

Remote files are read by a backend (see Backends). fsspec, which handles every kind of file, is always installed. remfile, which is faster for NWB/HDF5 files, is optional:

$ python3 -m pip install "datalad-fuse[remfile]"

The full extra installs every optional backend, currently the same one:

$ python3 -m pip install "datalad-fuse[full]"

Installing remfile is enough to start using it: NWB/HDF5 files are read with it by default from then on. Without it, those files are read with fsspec, as before.

Note

The optional backends are newer than the 0.6.0 release.

Checking the installation

datalad-fuse is a DataLad extension: it adds commands to DataLad. Check that DataLad finds them and that git-annex is available:

$ datalad fusefs --help
Usage: datalad fusefs [-h] [-d DATASET] [-f] [--mode-transparent]
...
$ git annex version
git-annex version: 10.20260901
...

and that the Python package can be imported:

$ python3 -c "import datalad_fuse; print(datalad_fuse.__version__)"

To check whether the optional remfile backend is available:

$ python3 -c "import remfile; print(remfile.__file__)"