KBFS On Linux

By default, the KBFS will only run on linux. This is a short guide on how to setup KBFS on Linux (tested on Ubuntu 15.10 with a BTRFS root). Note that this is unsupported and takes a little bit of work to get it to work.

Start by making sure you have the most recent version of Keybase. Assuming you installed from the .deb, run sudo apt-get upate then sudo apt-get install keybase.

So now we need to set up the filesystem for KBFS. Start by killing keybase so it doesn’t mess with anything as we go: sudo killall keybase. So now you need to create the /keybase folder so run sudo mkdir /keybase. Then we need to change the owner of /keybase to your user (from root) so that keybase can modify this. So run sudo chown username:username /keybase. Once that is done you can test it by cding into the directory.

So now just start the keybase daemon by running run_keybase. A box will pop up asking you to unlock your device key so KBFS can run. From here you can cd into /keybase/ to play around.

Note that ls and cd have some weird behavior in this folder. Since it is a FUSE it doesn’t follow all the normal specifications. For example, if you cd /keybase/public/ and ls you will not see a dworken folder, but if you cd dworken you will enter my public folder. So when playing around don’t expect KBFS to follow your normal expectations on how cd and ls work.