Dokan Library

Dokan Library is a software interface for Windows that bring the ability to create Virtual File System without writing your own device driver that required Windows Kernel knowledge. This is achieved by running file system code in user space while the Dokan kernel driver translate the request Windows Kernel.

Dokan is free software originally released under the terms of the LGPL and MIT.

It also offers a compatibility with FUSE file system by using a wrapper that can be build with Cygwin and MinGW.

History

The Dokan Library project was originally created and maintained by Hiroki Asakawa from 2007 to 2011.

It has been maintained from 2011 to 2014 by the community with different fork.

Since 2014, the project is highly maintained by Adrien J. and Maxime C. with the fork Dokany and gracefully code signed by the company ISLOG.

Uses

Dokan is particularly useful for writing Virtual File System without requiring Windows Kernel knowledge. It gives you the ability to mount a virtual hard drive that contains whatever the developer wants to show. It can be absolutely virtual like a memory files like a ram disk or it can show remote data like FTP, SSH, Samba, DataBase, ... as local storage that can be listed, read, written and delete.

The content of the File system it totally hackable by the developer using Dokan. The limit is only his imagination and the implementation.

Example uses

• DokanCloudFS: Access to different cloud storage services as virtual driver (OneDriver, Google Drive, MEGA, ...).
• Dokan SSHFS: SSH File System
• MLVFS: Magic Lantern Video File System
• Win-SSHFS: SSH with SSH.NET File System
• encfs4win: Encryption File System
• Opendedup CDFS: Deduplication Based File System
• Dokan NFC: RFID / NFC File System
• vramfs on Windows: VRAMFS on Windows - Create a file system in VRAM

External links

• Official website
• dokany on GitHub