Good to know: TableauFS is also available for download as a fancy docker container. Since Docker supports windows you can run the container directly on Windows and mount the contents of your Tableau Server directly as a network drive. Let’s see how easy is this in practice.
1. Install Docker
Docker is a container manager application where you can download, share and build OS containers. First of all you need to download Docker for Windows. The installation steps are described here: https://docs.docker.com/installation/windows/. The guide is detailed enough even for newcomers.
2. Grant SELECT on pg_largeobject
Using readonly account in Tableau is unfortunately not enough, you need to read from pg_largeobject table as well. The grant process is straightforward, just follow the steps described here: https://github.com/tfoldi/fuse-tableaufs#configuring-tableau-server-database.
3. Start the fuse-tableaufs container
This is the fun part. With one command we will instruct docker to download my image (if you don’t have it already), start it, mount your tableau server and make it available locally thru windows file share. Quite a lot of things from a single command line.
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docker run --rm --privileged -p 445:445 -t tfoldi/fuse-tableaufs tableau-samba.sh "ro,allow_other,pghost=<yourhost>,pguser=readonly,pgport=8060,pgpass=p@ssword" |
And the output should be:
Now the samba server is listening on default IP 192.168.59.103 port 445.
4. Map as a drive from windows
You can use Explorer to map the \\192.168.59.103\\tableaufs share as a drive but I am still a console guy, so I do it with:
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net use z: \\192.168.59.103\\tableaufs |
After the command you can browse your tableau server immediately:
5. Enjoy!

Browsing the server as folder
In the next posts I will show how can you version control your workbooks or gain more insight from their structures. Stay tuned!
- Tableau Extensions Addons Introduction: Synchronized Scrollbars - December 2, 2019
- Tableau External Services API: Adding Haskell Expressions as Calculations - November 20, 2019
- Scaling out Tableau Extracts – Building a distributed, multi-node MPP Hyper Cluster - August 11, 2019
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