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spf13
afero
Go2015–2025
spf13 / afero

afero

The Universal Filesystem Abstraction for Go

Systems & InfrastructureData & DatabasesNetworking
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6Distinct people
6Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
6.7KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

The Universal Filesystem Abstraction for Go

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-12-11 18:12:58 UTC to 2025-08-25 12:44:29 UTC.

0122015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments2025

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211

What Hacker News says

6 sources
joshuak·Aug 6, 2020
This is great. I've had challenges related to filesystem abstraction for years. I scoured the go packages on github for a solution, and found afero[1], but at the time that package had been languishing for years without anyone merging PRs, many of which were critical fixes. It's been picking up again recently so maybe it's better now, but at the time I needed a solution so I built abfs[2]. Abfs is conceptually identical to the go draft design, including the concept of "extension interfaces", although at the fs interface level not the file interface level. One of the problems I ran into early was the need for an easy to use file handle. The `net/http` FileSystem interface shows that you must always implement a custom Open function and a custom File. An object that implements `net/http` File is not adequate, it must actually be cast to ht
Read the rest
tp.File. Because of this I've found that it is burdensome to allow flexibility in the definition of the File interface because on the one hand specific functionality not obviously available to a generic File interface must be looked for using type assertion and the consequences of not finding it are poorly defined (should we return an error, should we proceed with some work around, etc), and on the other functions that return a file handle have many possible choices making un-anticipated interoperability unlikely. So instead I opted for always returning a `absfs/absfs` File interface, but return a ErrNotImplemented for functions that are not supported by an implementation. I don't like this, but I like it better then having to do a lot of interface unwrapping to get to the same place, and having it be an error makes the consequences more concrete. Nevertheless, I'm a million percent behind having a filesystem abstraction in the go standard library. It is immediately useful in testing to redirect potentially costly io operations. It is composable, allowing you to do very little work to wrap a file system with mutexes, timouts, and other gating mechanisms. It allows you to support a transactional file system by spawning a FileSystem from another FileSystem. Caching, copy on write, layering, and arbitrary data transformations are all much easier to reason about and implement using a prototypical filesystem as the model. Cheers, thanks for this Russ and Rob! From where I'm standing it would be one of the most valuable improvements to the go ecosystem possible at this point! [1]: https://github.com/spf13/afero [2]: https://github.com/absfs/absfs
In File System Interfaces for Go – Draft Design

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