HTTPDirFS

Have you ever wanted to mount those HTTP directory listings as if it was a partition? Look no further, this is your solution. HTTPDirFS stands for Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Directory Filesystem

The performance of the program is excellent, due to the use of curl-multi interface. HTTP connections are reused, and HTTP pipelining is used when available. I haven't benchmarked it, but I feel this is faster than rclone mount. The FUSE component itself also runs in multithreaded mode.

Compilation

This program was developed under Debian Stretch. If you are using the same operation system as me, you need libgumbo-dev, libfuse-dev, libssl1.0-dev and libcurl4-openssl-dev.

If you run Debian Stretch, and you have OpenSSL 1.0.2 installed, and you get warnings that look like below during compilation,

network.c:70:22: warning: ‘thread_id’ defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
static unsigned long thread_id(void)
                     ^~~~~~~~~
network.c:57:13: warning: ‘lock_callback’ defined but not used [-Wunused-function]
static void lock_callback(int mode, int type, char *file, int line)
            ^~~~~~~~~~~~~
/usr/bin/ld: warning: libcrypto.so.1.0.2, needed by /usr/lib/gcc/x86_64-linux-gnu/6/../../../x86_64-linux-gnu/libcurl.so, may conflict with libcrypto.so.1.1

then you need to check if libssl1.0-dev had been installed properly. If you get these compilation warnings, this program will ocassionally crash if you connect to HTTPS website. This is because OpenSSL 1.0.2 needs those functions for thread safety, whereas OpenSSL 1.1 does not. If you have libssl-dev rather than libssl1.0-dev installed, those call back functions will not be linked properly.

If you have OpenSSL 1.1 and the associated development headers installed, then you can safely ignore these warning messages. If you are on Debian Buster, you will definitely get these warning messages, and you can safely ignore them.

Usage

./httpdirfs -f $URL $YOUR_MOUNT_POINT

An example URL would be Debian CD Image Server. The -f flag keeps the program in the foreground, which is useful for monitoring which URL the filesystem is visiting.

Other useful options:

    -u   --user            HTTP authentication username
    -p   --password        HTTP authentication password
    -P   --proxy           Proxy for libcurl, for more details refer to
			https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/CURLOPT_PROXY.html

Configuration file support

There is now rudimentary config file support. The configuration file that the program will read is ${HOME}/.httpdirfs/config. You will have to create the sub-directory and the configuration file yourself. In the configuration file, please supply one option per line. For example:

$ cat ${HOME}/.httpdirfs/config
--username test
--password test
-f

SSL Support

If you run the program in the foreground, when it starts up, it will output the SSL engine version string. Please verify that your libcurl is linked against OpenSSL, as the pthread mutex functions are designed for OpenSSL.

The SSL engine version string looks something like this:

    libcurl SSL engine: OpenSSL/1.0.2l

The Technical Details

I noticed that most HTTP directory listings don't provide the file size for the web page itself. I suppose this makes perfect sense, as they are generated on the fly. Whereas the actual files have got file sizes. So the listing pages can be treated as folders, and the rest are files.

This program downloads the HTML web pages/files using libcurl, then parses the listing pages using Gumbo, and presents them using libfuse

LICENSE

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
(at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
along with this program.  If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.