autozfs

Daemon for OS X that listens for external drives being plugged in and automatically imports ZFS pools.

If you use or want to use ZFS on an external hard drive, you might find this useful :)

Installation

You'll need OpenZFSOnOSX or similar installed.

To build:

$ git clone https://github.com/michaelsproul/autozfs.git
$ cd autozfs
$ make

To install:

$ sudo cp autozfs /usr/local/bin/
$ sudo cp autozfs.plist /Library/LaunchDaemons/

Then either reboot, or run:

$ sudo launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/autozfs.plist

How does it work?

A background daemon started via launchd and running as root listens for "Disk Arbitration" events, and each time it detects a disk connection it runs zpool import -a. Simple!

Debugging

• You should be able to see a process called autozfs running, check Activity Monitor, ps, htop or whatever.
• The daemon logs inane messages to /private/var/log/autozfs.{log,err}.

Caveats

• OS X only (for now).
• IMPORTS ALL POOLS. This is hacky.
• Assumes zpool is installed in /usr/local/bin. This may not be true of all systems...
• Only auto-mounts USB devices, but it's an artificial restriction -- delete the USB stuff in the source and it should do Firewire/Thunderbolt/whatever just fine.

License

Copyright (c) 2017, Michael Sproul.

Licensed under the terms of the 3-clause BSD license.