Virtual File System (VFS)

OVMS includes a Virtual File System (VFS) used to unify all storage in the system. The primary configuration and scripting storage is mounted as ‘/store’, and the SD card as ‘/sd’. A ‘vfs’ set of commands is provided for basic manipulation of these stores:

OVMS# vfs ?
append               VFS Append a line to a file
cat                  VFS Display a file
cp                   VFS Copy a file
df                   VFS show disk usage
edit                 VFS edit a file
head                 VFS Display first 20 lines of a file
ls                   VFS Directory Listing
mkdir                VFS Create a directory
mv                   VFS Rename a file
rls                  VFS Recursive Directory Listing
rm                   VFS Delete a file
rmdir                VFS Delete a directory
stat                 VFS Status of a file
tail                 VFS output tail of a file

Please take care. This is a very small microcontroller based system with limited storage. The /store area should only be used for storage of configurations and small scripts. The /sd SD CARD area is more flexible and can be used for storing of configuration logs, firmware images, etc.

The ls, rls and rm commands take simple (* and ?) wildcards. So vfs rls /sd/*.js wold list all files with .js extension on the SD CARD.

Network Access

Network access to the VFS is available via SCP or through the web server.

SCP can access the whole file system and is read/write:

#copy a new firmware to the sd card on an OVMS named "leaf" in my ssh config
scp build/ovms3.bin leaf:/sd/dev_ovms3.bin

#copy a config backup from OVMS named "leaf" to my local directory
scp leaf:/sd/backup/cfg-2019-12-05.zip .

In the upload example the firmware can then be loaded with the OTA flash vfs command

Note

With OpenSSH version 9.0 (or later), the scp protocol has been disabled by default and replaced by the sftp protocol. To be able to use the scp command with OVMS, you need to re-enable the scp protocol with option -O on the command line:

scp -O ....

The web server offers read access rooted at the sd card. An example retrieving that same config file from the SCP example would look like:

http://leaf-abr.local/backup/cfg-2019-12-05.zip