Protocol Support

Overview

aiomegfile exposes a unified async API over several path protocols. In most cases you can switch between local and remote paths without changing the higher level calling code.

Supported Backends

Protocol	Path format	Availability	Notes
Local filesystem	/tmp/file or file:///tmp/file	Built in	Full read, write, scan, stat, and path operations.
Amazon S3	s3://bucket/key	Built in	Async object access backed by aiobotocore.
HTTP / HTTPS	http://... / https://...	Built in	Read-oriented access for streaming and metadata inspection.
SFTP	sftp://host/path	Built in	Remote filesystem access backed by asyncssh.
stdio	stdio://- / stdio://0 / stdio://1 / stdio://2	Built in	Bridge stdin, stdout, and stderr through the same async API.
HDFS	hdfs://cluster/path	Optional	Install aiomegfile[hdfs] to enable HDFS support.
WebDAV / WebDAVS	webdav://host/path / webdavs://host/path	Optional	Install aiomegfile[webdav] to enable WebDAV support.

Path Semantics

• Plain paths without a protocol are treated as local filesystem paths.

• SmartPath preserves the protocol, so SmartPath("s3://bucket/key") and SmartPath("/tmp/file") work through the same abstraction.

• Utility functions such as smart_open(), smart_copy(), and smart_sync() dispatch to the correct backend automatically.

Alias Support

Aliases are loaded from ~/.config/megfile/megfile.conf. They let you define short protocol prefixes for repeated locations.

Example:

[alias]
datasets = s3://company-datasets/
web = https://static.example.com/

After that, these URIs become valid inputs:

datasets://images/train-0001.jpg
web://releases/latest.json