openobjectstore

A Python Flask web app that serves files out of your IBM Object Storage without requiring authentication. openobjectstore follows RESTful principles.

IBM Object Storage is a lot like Amazon S3. Both enable storage and retrieval of any amount of data from anywhere on the web. Customers use it as a bulk repository, or "data lake," for analytics, backup & recovery, disaster recovery, and serverless computing. Many cloud-native applications even use it as primary storage, like http://datascience.ibm.com.

IBM Object Storage, out-of-the-box, doesn't provide public, unauthenticated access to files. This app fills that gap. For more details, read this blog post introducing open object store.

Running the app on Bluemix

1. If you do not already have a Bluemix account, sign up.
2. Deploy the app in one of 2 ways:

   • Click the Deploy to Bluemix button

     

   • Or, deploy for local development:

     1. Download and install the Cloud Foundry CLI tool

     2. Clone the app to your local environment from your terminal using the following command:

     $ git clone https://github.com/ibm-cds-labs/openobjectstore.git ```

     3. cd into this newly created directory

     4. Connect to Bluemix in the command line tool and follow the prompts to log in.

     $ cf api https://api.ng.bluemix.net $ cf login

     
      5. Provision an instance of Object Storage
     
     

     $ cf create-service objectstorage standard objectstorepublic

     
      5. Push the app to Bluemix.
     
     

     $ cf push

And voila! You now have your very own instance of the Python Hello World sample app running on Bluemix.

Run the app locally

1. If you do not already have a Bluemix account, sign up here

2. If you have not already, download Python and install it on your local machine. There are a number of best practices for developing locally with Python, that we assume you know (or will now quickly research and learn).

3. Clone the app to your local environment from your terminal using the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/ibm-cds-labs/openobjectstore.git

4. cd into this newly created directory

5. Create a new virtual environment with virtualenv and activate

$ virtualenv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate

6. Install the dependencies with pip

$ pip install -r requirements.txt

7. Start your app locally with the following command

$ python server.py

This command creates a new Flask app and starts your application. When your app has started, your console prints that you're Running on http://0.0.0.0:5000/ (Press CTRL+C to quit).

Troubleshooting

The primary source of debugging information for your Bluemix app is the logs. To see them, run the following command using the Cloud Foundry CLI:

$ cf logs openobjectstore --recent

For more detailed information on troubleshooting your application, see the Troubleshooting section in the Bluemix documentation.

Contribute

We are more than happy to accept external contributions to this project, be it in the form of issues and pull requests. If you find a bug, please create an issue or even better, fork the project and submit a pull request with your fix! Pull requests will be evaulated on an individual basis based on value add to the sample application.

Here are some features we're looking to implement:

Resource hiding

You may not want everything in your Object Storage to be public. There should be a configuration file -- and code that uses this file -- that specifies containers and/or objects within a public container that should be hidden from the public service interface.

Standard formats

It would be nice to implement some interoperable formats such as CKAN DCAT and Dublin Core. It would also be nice to have an HTML representation.

CRUD

In addition to the existing HTTP GET verb, we'd like to implement PUT and POST for updating and creating resources.

Privacy Notice

The openobjectstore sample web application includes code to track deployments to Bluemix and other Cloud Foundry platforms. The following information is sent to a Deployment Tracker service on each deployment:

• Python package version
• Python repository URL
• Application Name (application_name)
• Space ID (space_id)
• Application Version (application_version)
• Application URIs (application_uris)
• Labels of bound services
• Number of instances for each bound service and associated plan information

This data is collected from the setup.py file in the sample application and the VCAP_APPLICATION and VCAP_SERVICES environment variables in IBM Bluemix and other Cloud Foundry platforms. This data is used by IBM to track metrics around deployments of sample applications to IBM Bluemix to measure the usefulness of our examples, so that we can continuously improve the content we offer to you. Only deployments of sample applications that include code to ping the Deployment Tracker service will be tracked.

Disabling Deployment Tracking

Deployment tracking can be disabled by removing cf_deployment_tracker.track() from the server.py file.

License

This app is covered by the Apache 2.0 license. For more information, see LICENSE for license information.