Skip to main content
The archil CLI mounts an Archil disk as a real local filesystem on a Linux server, so any program — your shell, Python, a database, a training loop — can read and write files through standard POSIX APIs. The mount goes through the kernel’s FUSE layer and presents as a regular directory.

Guide

Install the client

To install or upgrade the Archil client, run the following on your server:
curl -s https://archil.com/install | sh

Authorize your server

Configure which servers can connect to the disk.
On the disk’s Details page, click Connections, click Add User, then select Disk Token. Copy the disk token and store it somewhere safe. Disk tokens cannot be retrieved again. A disk token is a credential scoped to the specific disk that it’s created on, and allows users to mount the disk.

Mount disk

Then mount the disk. The Archil console shows the exact command for your disk:
export ARCHIL_MOUNT_TOKEN="<disk-token>"
sudo --preserve-env=ARCHIL_MOUNT_TOKEN archil mount <disk-name> /mnt/data --region <disk-region>
If you are using IAM role authentication, no disk token is needed:
sudo archil mount <disk-name> /mnt/data --region <disk-region>
Files on a newly mounted disk are owned by root. Either change ownership (chown -R <user> /mnt/data) or use sudo when working with the data.
Always use archil unmount to unmount your disks, not the built-in umount command. archil unmount waits for all pending writes to flush to the backing store before exiting. This is especially important during system shutdown, where the kernel’s default umount will not wait for Archil writes to sync.

Using delegations

If you mount a disk in shared mode (with --shared, or on any disk that’s currently mounted from another client), some write operations are unavailable by default until you explicitly check out the file or directory you intend to write. For the full model, see Shared Disks. Check out a path before writing, and check it back in when you’re done:
archil checkout /mnt/data/my-file.txt
# ... edit the file ...
archil checkin /mnt/data/my-file.txt
Checkouts on a directory cover its entire subtree, so you can check out /mnt/data/my-project once and write anywhere inside it. To see what you currently hold, run archil delegations /mnt/data. See the archil CLI reference for every flag, including --force for revoking another client’s delegation.

Mount automatically on startup

If you’re running a service on Archil on servers in an ASG, you’ll want to mount Archil at startup. You can do this by adding Archil to the server’s /etc/fstab:
<disk-name> <mountpoint> archil _netdev,region=<region>,defaults 0 0
Parameters:
  • <disk-name>: An owner-qualified disk name (organization/disk-name or employee@email.com/disk-name) or disk ID (dsk-0123456789abcdef).
  • <mountpoint>: Local directory where the disk should be mounted (e.g., /mnt/archil).
  • archil: Filesystem type for Archil disks.
  • _netdev: Tells systemd this is a network filesystem that needs network connectivity before mount.
  • region=<region>: The region your disk is in (e.g., aws-us-east-1).
Example:
# /etc/fstab
myorg/mydisk /mnt/data archil _netdev,region=aws-us-east-1,defaults 0 0
The _netdev option is essential. Without it, systemd may try to mount the disk before network connectivity is established, causing boot failures or timeouts.
Test the entry without rebooting:
sudo mount -a            # mount everything in fstab
sudo mount /mnt/data     # mount a specific entry

Mount in a container

To mount from inside a Docker/OCI container (or share a host mount with one), see Mount in a container.

Command reference

For every flag and subcommand archil accepts — mount, unmount, checkout, checkin, delegations, status, set-cache-expiry — see the archil CLI reference.