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Note: This project is still maintained but has essentially been superceded by gocryptfs-ui which uses gocryptfs rather than encfs because encfs development is now dormant. It is recommended that users of encfsui migrate to gocryptfs-ui.

Encfsui is a bash script which provides a simple gui around the encfs command line utility to mount and unmount an encrypted directory. This script requires encfs, zenity, and xdg-open.

Whenever you want to mount your private directory, you click on the desktop launcher. The launcher runs the script with appropriate directory arguments. The script uses zenity to prompt you for the password and then mounts the encfs directory. If you click on the launcher when the private directory is already mounted, then you are prompted to unmount it. The prompt windows are displayed in the wiki. There are some other options, see the usage below.

My motivation for creating this utility is to provide:

1. One mouse click and password entry to access and open a single encrypted personal directory.
2. One mouse click to close the directory.
3. No background application running.
4. No password cached anywhere.

The latest version and documentation is available at http://github.com/bulletmark/encfsui.

NOTE: Arch users can just install encfsui from the AUR and skip to the next section. Other users can install by running:

# Install encfs zenity xdg-utils
git clone http://github.com/bulletmark/encfsui
cd encfsui
sudo make install (or sudo ./encfsui-setup install)

The installation procedure creates a desktop application encfsui which you can run from your DE. By default, encfsui mounts your encrypted ~/.Private dir to unencrypted ~/Private with an in-activity timeout of 60 minutes. So you should first create an encfs ~/.Private directory, or create a link to there from where you keep your encrypted directory. See man encfs for details on how to create a new encrypted directory.

You can also copy the /usr/share/applications/encfsui.desktop launcher to your own Desktop Launcher in ~/.local/share/applications/ to use different source or target directory names, or to change the timeout, etc.

The utility can also be run from the command line. The usage is:

encfsui [-options] source_enc_dir target_mount_dir

GUI utility to mount source_enc_dir to target_mount_dir.
If target already mounted then it will be unmounted instead.

Options:
-i <mins> specify idle timeout mins
-p (make public mount, can only be done by root)
-o (don't open target dir in gui mode)

Note that encfsui now installs system-wide but old versions installed as local user files so to ensure that any old user configuration is removed type the following as your normal user (i.e. not sudo/root).

encfsui-setup clean

You can type this any time so no harm is done running it to make sure.

cd encfsui  # Source dir, as above
git pull
sudo make install (or sudo ./encfsui-setup install)

Copyright (C) 2012 Mark Blakeney. This program is distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ for more details.