The target development platform has changed to Ubuntu 14.04 [1]. This patch makes the suggested SAIO platform the same. Also, remove pointer to wiki page for other platform install instructions that either redirects back to this SAIO doc or to another wike page and then a dead link. [1] I0a96bcf692bb240f3ab5aab7fefd294a07735a83 DocImpact Change-Id: I9f96104b5437c1f1f28f924c048ef83cf03338f4
Swift
A distributed object storage system designed to scale from a single machine to thousands of servers. Swift is optimized for multi-tenancy and high concurrency. Swift is ideal for backups, web and mobile content, and any other unstructured data that can grow without bound.
Swift provides a simple, REST-based API fully documented at http://docs.openstack.org/.
Swift was originally developed as the basis for Rackspace's Cloud Files and was open-sourced in 2010 as part of the OpenStack project. It has since grown to include contributions from many companies and has spawned a thriving ecosystem of 3rd party tools. Swift's contributors are listed in the AUTHORS file.
Docs
To build documentation install sphinx (pip install sphinx
), run
python setup.py build_sphinx
, and then browse to /doc/build/html/index.html.
These docs are auto-generated after every commit and available online at
http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/.
For Developers
The best place to get started is the "SAIO - Swift All In One". This document will walk you through setting up a development cluster of Swift in a VM. The SAIO environment is ideal for running small-scale tests against swift and trying out new features and bug fixes.
You can run unit tests with .unittests
and functional tests with
.functests
.
If you would like to start contributing, check out these notes to help you get started.
Code Organization
- bin/: Executable scripts that are the processes run by the deployer
- doc/: Documentation
- etc/: Sample config files
- swift/: Core code
- account/: account server
- common/: code shared by different modules
- middleware/: "standard", officially-supported middleware
- ring/: code implementing Swift's ring
- container/: container server
- obj/: object server
- proxy/: proxy server
- test/: Unit and functional tests
Data Flow
Swift is a WSGI application and uses eventlet's WSGI server. After the
processes are running, the entry point for new requests is the Application
class in swift/proxy/server.py
. From there, a controller is chosen, and the
request is processed. The proxy may choose to forward the request to a back-
end server. For example, the entry point for requests to the object server is
the ObjectController
class in swift/obj/server.py
.
For Deployers
Deployer docs are also available at http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/. A good starting point is at http://docs.openstack.org/developer/swift/deployment_guide.html
You can run functional tests against a swift cluster with .functests
. These
functional tests require /etc/swift/test.conf
to run. A sample config file
can be found in this source tree in test/sample.conf
.
For Client Apps
For client applications, official Python language bindings are provided at http://github.com/openstack/python-swiftclient.
Complete API documentation at http://docs.openstack.org/api/openstack-object-storage/1.0/content/
For more information come hang out in #openstack-swift on freenode.
Thanks,
The Swift Development Team