Commons Virtual File System

Commons VFS provides a single API for accessing various different file systems. It presents a uniform view of the files from various different sources, such as the files on local disk, on an HTTP server, or inside a Zip archive.

Some of the features of Commons VFS are:

  • A single consistent API for accessing files of different types.
  • Support for numerous file system types .
  • Caching of file information. Caches information in-JVM, and optionally can cache remote file information on the local file system.
  • Event delivery.
  • Support for logical file systems made up of files from various different file systems.
  • Utilities for integrating Commons VFS into applications, such as a VFS-aware ClassLoader and URLStreamHandlerFactory.
  • A set of VFS-enabled Ant tasks .

Requirements

Commons VFS 2.0 requires Java 5. Many of the file systems require that optional components be present in order for the protocol to be enabled. See the download and build page for information on the optional dependencies.

News

Commons VFS 2.0 is now available. Support for FTPS and WebDav have been added in addition to many bugs being fixed. Version 2.0 is not binary compatible with version 1.0. To insure that both 1.0 and 2.0 can coexist version 2.0 has had its Maven groupId changed to org.apache.commons, its Maven artifact changed to commons-vfs2, and the package names are now org.apache.commons.vfs2. The API changes are fairly minor and will mostly impact provider implementations.