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://doc.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.

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