EdenFS speeds up operations in large repositories by only populating working directory files on demand, as they are accessed. This makes operations like checkout much faster, in exchange for a small performance hit when first accessing new files. This is quite beneficial in large repositories where developers often only work with a small subset of the repository at a time.

EdenFS has similar performance advantages to using sparse checkouts, but a much better user experience. Unlike with sparse checkouts, EdenFS does not require manually curating the list of files to check out, and users can transparently access any file without needing to update the profile.

EdenFS also keeps track of which files have been modified, allowing very efficient status queries that do not need to scan the working directory. The filesystem monitoring tool Watchman also integrates with EdenFS, allowing it to more efficiently track updates to the filesystem.

EdenFS currently only builds on Linux. We have primarily tested building it on Ubuntu 18.04.

[eden]$ ./getdeps.py --system-deps
[eden]$ mkdir _build && cd _build
[eden/_build]$ cmake ..
[eden/_build]$ make

EdenFS depends on several other third-party projects. Some of these are commonly available as part of most Linux distributions, while others need to be downloaded and built from GitHub.

The getdeps.py script can be used to help download and build EdenFS's dependencies.

Running getdeps.py with --system-deps will make it install third-party dependencies available from your operating system's package management system. Without this argument it assumes you already have correct OS dependencies installed, and it only updates and builds dependencies that must be compiled from source.

By default getdeps.py will check out third-party dependencies into the eden/external/ directory, then build and install them into eden/external/install/

If repositories for some of the dependencies are already present in eden/external/ getdeps.py does not automatically fetch the latest upstream changes from GitHub. You can explicitly run ./getdeps.py --update if you want it to fetch the latest updates for each dependency and rebuild them from scratch.