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macFUSE is a software package that brings support for third party user space file systems to macOS. The content of those file system can come from local disks, cloud storage services, or any other source. There are countless third party products that rely on macFUSE to provide file system integration.

macFUSE lets developers create file systems without having to write a single line of kernel code. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the macFUSE kernel extension provides a "bridge" to the actual kernel interfaces.

For detailed installation instructions, see Getting Started.

About macFUSE

The software package provides multiple APIs for developing full-featured user space file systems. libfuse.dylib provides a superset of the standard Unix FUSE API. macFUSE.framework is a high-level Objective-C wrapper for the libfuse C API.

Developers can create numerous types of file systems using the provided APIs, e.g. on-disk file systems, layering file systems, network/distributed file system and many more. Three popular use cases are accessing files in the cloud, accessing files on non-native (unsupported by macOS) file systems and transparent encryption/decryption of files.

macFUSE file systems are regular applications (as opposed to kernel extensions). This means developers have as much flexibility and choice in programming tools, debuggers, and libraries as they have when developing regular application for macOS.