Go 1.16 feature: The fs module

Embed isn’t the only new package that made it into 1.16. There’s now also io/fs which contains lots of functionality that was previously part of io/ioutil or something like spf13/afero: A general abstraction on top of file-system operations and navigation which is currently limited to read-operations.

The io/fs package provides primarily the new FS interface:

type FS interface {
    Open(name string) (File, error)
}

There are also a couple of other interfaces that a file-system might implement like StatFS, SubFS, or ReadDirFS which allow implementors adding things like more performance stat access or directory handling.

All of that would be rather pointless if there wasn’t also a way to actually create something that implements those interfaces. For working with an actual OS file-system, the os package offers the new DirEnv(path string) (fs.FS, error) function.

If you want to have an instance of such a filesystem, you can use the new os.DirEnv(path string) (fs.FS, error) function. Sadly, the FS instance that is returned here really only implements the Open method. That being said, the fs-package offers some helper methods for iterating over directories or just listing all their entries that can work with this:

• fs.WalkDir(fsys fs.FS, root string, fn fs.WalkDirFn) error
• fs.ReadDir(fsys fs.FS, name string) ([]fs.DirEntry, error)

So where can you now use fs.FS outside of the new package? Within the standard library I’ve found the following places so far:

• You can mount a FS into a http.Server using the new http.FS function.
• text/template.Template now also has a ParseFS method so that you can parse templates from a file-system (same for html/template).

In order to test such setups there is also a new testing/fstest package which provides a map-based file-system with MapFS.

In general, this looks really nice and might eventually make spf13/afero obsolete for my use-cases 🙂 One thing that’s missing right now is any kind of write-support. There are helpers like fs.ReadFile and so on but the fs.File interface right now only offers reading methods.

At this point there is also no context support. I’m currently assuming that write-support will make its way into the io/fs interfaces but context-support according to this ticket sounds like a bigger issue.