Run your own Software Heritage

This tutorial will guide from the basic step of obtaining the source code of the Software Heritage stack to running a local copy of it with which you can archive source code and browse it on the web. To that end, just follow the steps detailed below.

Warning

Running a Software Heritage instance on your machine can consume quite a bit of resources: if you play a bit too hard (e.g., if you try to list all GitHub repositories with the corresponding lister), you may fill your hard drive, and consume a lot of CPU, memory and network bandwidth.

Dependencies

The easiest way to run a Software Heritage instance is to use Docker. Please ensure that you have a working recent installation first (including the Compose plugin.

Quick start

First, retrieve Software Heritage development environment to get the Docker configuration:

~$ git clone https://forge.softwareheritage.org/source/swh-environment.git
~$ cd swh-environment/docker

Then, start containers:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose up -d
[...]
Creating docker_amqp_1               ... done
Creating docker_zookeeper_1          ... done
Creating docker_kafka_1              ... done
Creating docker_flower_1             ... done
Creating docker_swh-scheduler-db_1   ... done
[...]

This will build Docker images and run them. Check everything is running fine with:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose ps
                         Name                                       Command               State                                      Ports
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
docker_amqp_1                                    docker-entrypoint.sh rabbi ...   Up      15671/tcp, 0.0.0.0:5018->15672/tcp, 25672/tcp, 4369/tcp, 5671/tcp, 5672/tcp
docker_flower_1                                  flower --broker=amqp://gue ...   Up      0.0.0.0:5555->5555/tcp
docker_kafka_1                                   start-kafka.sh                   Up      0.0.0.0:5092->5092/tcp
docker_swh-deposit-db_1                          docker-entrypoint.sh postgres    Up      5432/tcp
docker_swh-deposit_1                             /entrypoint.sh                   Up      0.0.0.0:5006->5006/tcp
[...]

The startup of some containers may fail the first time for dependency-related problems. If some containers failed to start, just run the docker compose up -d command again.

If a container really refuses to start properly, you can check why using the docker compose logs command. For example:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose logs swh-lister
Attaching to docker_swh-lister_1
[...]
swh-lister_1                      | Processing /src/swh-scheduler
swh-lister_1                      | Could not install packages due to an EnvironmentError: [('/src/swh-scheduler/.hypothesis/unicodedata/8.0.0/charmap.json.gz', '/tmp/pip-req-build-pm7nsax3/.hypothesis/unicodedata/8.0.0/charmap.json.gz', "[Errno 13] Permission denied: '/src/swh-scheduler/.hypothesis/unicodedata/8.0.0/charmap.json.gz'")]
swh-lister_1                      |

Note

For details on the various Docker images and how to work with them, see the full Docker environment documentation.

Once all containers are running, you can use the web interface by opening http://localhost:5080/ in your web browser.

At this point, the archive is empty and needs to be filled with some content. The simplest way to start loading software is to use the Save Code Now feature of the archive web interface:

You can also use the command line interface to inject code. For example to retrieve projects hossted on the https://0xacab.org GitLab forge:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose exec swh-scheduler \
    swh scheduler task add list-gitlab-full \
      -p oneshot url=https://0xacab.org/api/v4

Created 1 tasks

Task 1
  Next run: just now (2018-12-19 14:58:49+00:00)
  Interval: 90 days, 0:00:00
  Type: list-gitlab-full
  Policy: oneshot
  Args:
  Keyword args:
    url=https://0xacab.org/api/v4

This task will scrape the forge’s project list and register origins to the scheduler. This takes at most a couple of minutes.

Then, you must tell the scheduler to create loading tasks for these origins. For example, to create tasks for 100 of these origins:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose exec swh-scheduler \
    swh scheduler origin schedule-next git 100

This will take a bit of time to complete.

To increase the speed at which git repositories are imported, you can spawn more swh-loader-git workers:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose exec swh-scheduler \
    celery status
listers@50ac2185c6c9: OK
loader@b164f9055637: OK
indexer@33bc6067a5b8: OK
vault@c9fef1bbfdc1: OK

4 nodes online.
~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose exec swh-scheduler \
    celery control pool_grow 3 -d loader@b164f9055637
-> loader@b164f9055637: OK
        pool will grow
~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose exec swh-scheduler \
    celery inspect -d loader@b164f9055637 stats | grep prefetch_count
       "prefetch_count": 4

Now there are 4 workers ingesting git repositories. You can also increase the number of swh-loader-git containers:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose up -d --scale swh-loader=4
[...]
Creating docker_swh-loader_2        ... done
Creating docker_swh-loader_3        ... done
Creating docker_swh-loader_4        ... done

Updating the docker image

All containers started by docker compose are bound to a docker image named swh/stack including all the software components of Software Heritage. When new versions of these components are released, the docker image will not be automatically updated. In order to update all Software Heritage components to their latest version, the docker image needs to be explicitly rebuilt by issuing the following command from within the docker directory:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker build --no-cache -t swh/stack .

Monitor your local installation

You can monitor your local installation by looking at:

Shut down your local installation

To shut down your SoftWare Heritage, just run:

~/swh-environment/docker$ docker compose down

Hacking the archive

If you want to hack the code of the Software Heritage Archive, a more involved setup is required described in the developer setup guide.