Using Orbit with the Swift CLI

Our storage service, Orbit, provides an OpenStack Swift API, for which there are many compatible libraries and tools, such as the official swift command line interface.

For authentication you can use either your Brightbox username and password, or (preferably) an API Client identifier and secret. Obviously use your account identifier instead of acc-xxxxx:

Check your account stats

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx -U cli-yyyyy -K mysecret  stat

Account: acc-xxxxx
Containers: 3
   Objects: 45845
     Bytes: 93603164978

Or using your username and password

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx -U jason@example.com -K mypassword stat

Account: acc-xxxxx
Containers: 3
   Objects: 45845
     Bytes: 93603164978

If you are a collaborator on other accounts, you can access them by specifying the other account identifier in the authentication url:

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-zzzzz -U jason@example.com -K mypassword stat

Account: acc-zzzzz
Containers: 37
   Objects: 945845
     Bytes: 25593603164978

Upload a file

Upload a file to a new container:

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx -U cli-yyyyy -K mysecret upload avatars jason.jpg

Then list the containers:

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx -U cli-yyyyy -K mysecret list

avatars

Then list the files in the new container:

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx -U cli-yyyyy -K mysecret list avatars

jason.jpg

Access control

You can control access to containers using access control lists. For example, to make the objects in a container publicly readable:

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx -U cli-yyyyy -K mysecret post avatars --read-acl='.r:*'

You can then access the objects via HTTP:

$ curl -I https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx/avatars/jason.jpg

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Length: 430307
Content-Type: image/jpeg
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Last-Modified: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 00:03:39 GMT
Etag: 1c37aa571827f7833e7a4a276fd33485

Directory lisitings

You can enable public directory listings for a container like this:

$ swift -A https://orbit.brightbox.com/v1/acc-xxxxx -U cli-yyyyy -K mysecret post avatars -m 'web-listings: true'