Support dynamic addition of filesystem instances

[paulmillar]

I think it would be a useful if the UI were to allow the user to add configured filesystems.

Currently, the file jupter-fsspec.yaml must be edited in order to include additional filesystems. While the file's format is reasonable, I think this places a barrier against adoption: users need to learn that this file exists and how to edit it.

An alternative, complementary approach might be to update the UI to allow the user to create new filesystems on demand. The UI would allow the user to specify the name and the path as mandatory elements, with optional args and kwargs to adjust the fsspec backend implementation's behaviour. Additionally, the UI could identify a list of available fsspec backend implementations and help the user make a valid choice, when specifying the path.

[martindurant]

Easing FS configuration and creation is definitely planned. The first step might be to provide a button which opens the config file in a normal YAML editor view. A general kwarg editor dialog would be hard; while getting the big list of known filesystem types is easy, editing further arguments is not given the set of possibilities for kwargs.

[martindurant]

See also https://filesystem-spec.readthedocs.io/en/latest/features.html#file-selector-gui , an ipywidget FS picker embedded in notebooks with similar issues.

[paulmillar]

Thanks for the quick reply with useful feedback, @martindurant !

I think you have already seen this, but I've opened issue #1913 in fsspec, suggesting fsspec is improved to give clients the possibility to discover how a backend may be configured.

That fsspec issue was very much inspired by this (jupyter-fsspec-specific) issue, although I agree that the fsspec's file-selector GUI would also likely benefit from improving issue #1913.

[martindurant]

Another possibility that might be considered, given that we have GUI space to play with, is some dropdown to choose the FS type (by protocol), and for the given selection, the signature and docstring can be rendered into a separate panel (this reminds me of spyder!).

These are just ideas, but we can probably come to a nice visual config system eventually.