Software Installation

To install Cosnim, you need to:

Install a FUSE driver
Download the Cosnim software
Install/expand the software
Check the installation
Install Finder Quick Actions (optional)
Enable Docker (optional)

Install FUSE

Install a FUSE package according to your OS:

To install a FUSE driver on Windows, install WinFsp from https://winfsp.dev/rel/

Make sure to select the “FUSE for Cygwin” option during installation:

To install FUSE on a Debian-based Linux system, use the apt packaging system:

apt install fuse

To install FUSE on a RedHat-based Linux system, use the yum packaging system:

yum install fuse fuse-libs

Download the Cosnim software

Download from https://downloads.cosnim.com the installation package appropriate for your OS and platform. You’ll need the username & password that was sent to you by email to access the downloads website.

Install/expand the software

Double-click on Cosnim’s msi installer and follow the instructions.

Afterwards, you should create a ‘cosnim’ directory at a location of your choosing to hold the configuration files, capsules and mounts for a given continuum. For more information, see Quick Start.

Installation consists of expanding the downloaded tarball.

If you’re installing Cosnim for a single user, you should first create a ‘cosnim’ directory and expand the software in a ‘bin’ subdirectory. This will help later on when configuring and running Cosnim from a single location:

mkdir -p cosnim/bin

tar -xf Cosnim-0.4-Preview.8-Debian.10-Build.xxxx.tar.gz -C cosnim/bin

Once the tarball is expanded, the entire software is fully installed.

Check installation

To check that Cosnim can run properly on your machine, run the cosnim --version command.

Open a Command Prompt and run the command:

cosnim --version

Open a terminal session and first update the current PATH to include the installed software:

. <installation_location>/activate

Then run the command:

cosnim --version

Install Finder Quick Actions (MacOS)

When running under MacOS, you should install Cosnim’s Finder Quick Actions to make it easy to explore Time-Travel directly from the Finder (highly recommended). To do so:

From the Finder, open the ‘samples’ folder under the ‘bin’ directory where you installed Cosnim.
Double-click the file ‘MacOS Finder Quick Actions.zip’. This will expand the zip file.
Select and double-click all the actions found in the ‘MacOS Finder Quick Actions’ folder.
Click OK when prompted by MacOS to confirm the installation of the actions.

Note

MacOS automatically removes the quick actions from the installation’s directory during installation. If you need to re-install the actions, repeat the above instructions to re-expand the zip file.

Authorize Docker Containers

Mounting from within a container

If you intend to mount a Cosnim filesystem from within a Docker container, you need to give the container the SYS_ADMIN capability and expose the /dev/fuse filesystem as follows:

docker run .. --cap-add SYS_ADMIN --device /dev/fuse

If using docker-compose, add the following parameters:

cap_add:
  - SYS_ADMIN
devices:
  - /dev/fuse

Mounting on the host without authorizations

If you don’t want to give additional capabilities to containers or wish to have more control over Cosnim’s operation, you can mount the Cosnim filesystem directly on the host and expose the mountpoint to the container as a volume. For example:

cosnim mount -o mount.mountpoint=/mnt/cosnim_1
docker run .. -v /mnt/cosnim_1:/cosnim_1

The container will not be able to start and stop Cosnim and will not have access to any of its configuration or credentials, but will be able to access all of its files through the mountpoint without constraints.