Fixing broken encfs + osxfuse after upgrade using MacPorts

After a sudo port selfupdate and sudo port upgrade outdated, trying to mount an encrypted filesystem with encfs stopped working, with the error message:

mount_osxfuse: the loaded OSXFUSE kernel extension has a mismatched version
fuse failed.  Common problems:
 - fuse kernel module not installed (modprobe fuse)
 - invalid options -- see usage message

The upgrade of osxfuse had the following notes:

osxfuse has the following notes:
  When upgrading, unmount all FUSE filesystems and then unload the kernel extension.
  Unloading can be done via: sudo kextunload -b com.github.osxfuse.filesystems.osxfuse
  Alternatively (or if this fails), just reboot your computer now.

I ran sudo kextunload -b com.github.osxfuse.filesystems.osxfuse but still got the same error when trying to mount with encfs. According to kextstat | grep osxfuse the kernel extension appeared unloaded. I rebooted, but no change.

I thought of reinstalling osxfuse and encfs. Running sudo port uninstall osxfuse gave me this:

The following versions of osxfuse are currently installed:
 1) osxfuse @3.8.2_0
 2) osxfuse @3.9.0_0 (active)
Enter option(s) [1-2/all]: 

I uninstalled both, and encfs, then reinstalled encfs, still the same error. In retrospect, probably I could have activated osxfuse @3.8.2_0 with sudo port activate osxfuse @3.8.2_0. I’ll try that next time.

I thought of installing osxfuse @3.8.2_0. In the docs, I couldn’t find a simple command to do that, but instructions to clone https://github.com/macports/macports-ports, find an appropriate commit and build from that. That looked kind of complicated, so instead of that, following a hunch, I tried installing from tbz2 files in http://packages.macports.org/osxfuse/

There I found multiple versions for 3.8.2 (13, 14, …, 18). I tried 13, and got build errors I couldn’t make sense of. I tried 18, and that went through, that is:

sudo port install http://packages.macports.org/osxfuse/osxfuse-3.8.2_0.darwin_18.x86_64.tbz2

After this, and making sure the previous version is not loaded, encfs is back to working again.

Fixing broken encfs + osxfuse after upgrade using MacPorts —09 June 2019