Dokany

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What is Dokan

When you want to create a new file system on Windows, other than FAT or NTFS, you need to develop a file system driver. Developing a device driver that works in kernel mode on windows is extremely technical. By using Dokan, you can create your own file systems very easily without writing device drivers. Dokan is similar to FUSE (Linux file system in user space) but works on Windows. Moreover dokany include a FUSE wrapper that help you to port your FUSE filesystems without changes

What is Dokany

Dokany is a fork of Dokan 0.6.0 with bug fixes, clean change history and updated to build with latest tools.

Because the original Dokan Legacy (< 0.6.0) project is no longer maintained.

Since version 0.8.0, dokany break dokan API compatibility. See Choose a version for more informations.

Signed x86 / x64 drivers are provided at each release.

Licensing

Dokan contains LGPL and MIT licensed programs.

user-mode library (dokan1.dll) LGPL
driver (dokan1.sys) LGPL
network library (dokannp1.dll) LGPL
fuse library (dokanfuse1.dll) LGPL
installer (DokanSetup.exe) LGPL
control program (dokanctl.exe) MIT
samples (mirror.c) MIT

For details, please check license files.

LGPL license.lgpl.txt
MIT license.mit.txt

You can obtain source files from https://dokan-dev.github.io

Environment

Dokan works on

Windows 10
Windows Server 2012 R2
Windows 8.1
Windows Server 2012
Windows 8
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
Windows 7 SP1

How it works

Dokan library contains a user mode DLL (dokan1.dll) and a kernel mode file system driver (dokan1.sys). Once Dokan file system driver is installed, you can create file systems which can be seen as normal file systems in Windows. The application that creates file systems using Dokan library is called File system application.

File operation requests from user programs (e.g., CreateFile, ReadFile, WriteFile, ...) will be sent to the Windows I/O subsystem (runs in kernel mode) which will subsequently forward the requests to the Dokan file system driver (dokan1.sys). By using functions provided by the Dokan user mode library (dokan1.dll), file system applications are able to register callback functions to the file system driver. The file system driver will invoke these callback routines in order to response to the requests it received. The results of the callback routines will be sent back to the user program.

For example, when Windows Explorer requests to open a directory, the CreateFile with Direction option request will be sent to Dokan file system driver and the driver will invoke the CreateFile callback provided by the file system application. The results of this routine are sent back to Windows Explorer as the response to the CreateFile request. Therefore, the Dokan file system driver acts as a proxy between user programs and file system applications. The advantage of this approach is that it allows programmers to develop file systems in user mode which is safe and easy to debug.

To learn more about Dokan file system development, see the API documentation.

Build

In short, download and install the Visual Studio 2015 with SDK 10 & WDK 10

For details, see the build page.

Installation

For manual installation, see the installation page.

Contribute

You want Dokan to get better? Contribute!

Learn the code and suggest your changes on GitHub repository.

Detect defects and report them on GitHub issue tracker.

Ask and answer questions on Google discussion group.