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Getting Started with the Software Heritage API#

Introduction#

About Software Heritage#

The Software Heritage project was started in 2015 with a rather impressive goal and purpose:

Software Heritage is an ambitious initiative that aims at collecting, organizing, preserving and sharing all the source code publicly available in the world.

Yes, all source code available in the world. It implies to build an equally impressive infrastructure to hold the huge amount of information represented, make the archive available to the public through a nice web interface and even propose a well-documented API to access it seamlessly. For the records, there are also various datasets available for download, with detailed instructions about how to set it up. And, yes it’s huge: the full graph generated from the archive (with only metadata, content is not included) has more than 20b nodes and weights 1.2TB. Overall size of the archive is in the hundreds of TBs.

This article presents, and demonstrates the use of, the Software Heritage API to query basic information about archived content and fetch the content of a software project.

Terms and Concepts#

For our activity we need to define the following terms and concepts:

  • The repositories analysed by the SWH are registered as origins. Examples of origins are: https://bitbucket.org/anthroweb/apache.git, apache/ant, or other types of sources (debian source packages, npmjs, pypi, cran..).

  • When repositories are analysed, it creates snapshots. Snapshots describe the state of the repository at the time of analysis, and provide links to the repository content. As an example in the case of a git repository, the snapshot links to the list of branches, which themselves link to revisions and releases.

  • Revisions are consistent sets of directories and contents representing the repository at a given time, like in a baseline. They can be conceptually mapped to commits in subversion, to git references, or to source package versions in debian or nmpjs repositories.

  • Revisions are linked to a directory, which itself links to other directories and contents (aka blobs).

A full list of terms is provided in the Software Heritage doc.

Preliminary steps#

This article uses Python 3.x on the client side, and the requests Python module to manipulate the HTTP requests. Note however that any language that provides HTTP requests (GET, POST) can access the API and could be used. Firstly let’s make sure we have the correct Python version and module installed:

boris@castalia:notebook$ python3 -V
Python 3.7.3
boris@castalia:notebooks$ pip3 install requests
Requirement already satisfied: requests in /usr/lib/python3/dist-packages (2.21.0)
boris@castalia:notebook$

Initialise the script#

We need to import a few modules and utilities to play with the Software Heritage API, namely json and the aforementioned requests modules. We also define a utility function to pretty-print json data easily:

import json
import requests

# Utility to pretty-print json.
def jprint(obj):
    # create a formatted string of the Python JSON object
    print(json.dumps(obj, sort_keys=True, indent=4))

The syntax mentioned in the API documentation is rather straightforward. Since we want to read it from the main Software Heritage server, we will use https://archive.softwareheritage.org/ as the basename. All API calls will be forged according to the same syntax:

https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/<endpoint>

Request basic Information#

We want to get some basic information about the main server activity and content. The stat endpoint provides a summary of the main indexes and some statistics about the archive. We can request a GET on the main counters of the archive using the counters path, as described in the endpoint documentation:

/api/1/stat/counters/

This API endpoint returns the following information:

  • content is the total number of blobs (files) in the archive.

  • directory is the total number of repositories in the archive.

  • origin is the number of distinct origins (repositories) fetched by the archive bots.

  • origin_visits is the total number of visits across all origins.

  • person is the number of authors (e.g. committers, authors) in the archived files.

  • release is the number of tags retrieved in the archive.

  • revision is the number of revisions stored in the archive.

  • skipped_content is the number of objects which could be imported in the archive.

  • snapshot is the number of snapshots stored in the archive.

Note that we use the default JSON format for the output. We could use YAML if we wanted to, with a custom Request Headers set to application/yaml.

resp = requests.get("https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/stat/counters/")
counters = resp.json()
jprint(counters)

{
    "content": 10049535736,
    "directory": 8390591308,
    "origin": 156388918,
    "person": 42263568,
    "release": 17218891,
    "revision": 2109783249
}

There are almost 10bn blobs (aka files) in the archive and 8bn+ directories already, for 155m repositories analysed.

Now, what about a specific repository? Let’s say we want to find if alambic (an open-source data provider and analysis system for software development) has already been analysed by the archive’s bots.

Search the archive#

Search for a keyword#

The easiest way to look for a keyword in the repositories analysed by the archive is to use the search feature of the origin endpoint. Documentation for the endpoint is here and the complete syntax is:

/api/1/origin/search/<keyword>/

The server returns an array of hashes, with each item being formatted as:

  • origin_visits_url attribute is an URL that points to the API page listing all visits (bot fetches) to this repository.

  • url is the url of the origin, or repository, itself.

A (truncated) example of a result from this endpoint is shown below:

[
  {
    "origin_visits_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/origin/https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic/visits/",
    "url": "https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic"
  }
  ...
]

As an example we will look for instances of alambic in the archive’s analysed repositories:

resp = requests.get("https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/origin/search/alambic/")
origins = resp.json()
print(f"We found {len(origins)} entries.")
for origin in origins[1:10]:
    print(f"- {origin['url']}")

Which produces:

We found 52 entries.
-  https://github.com/royal-alambic-club/sauron
-  https://github.com/scamberlin/alambic
-  https://github.com/WebTales/alambic-connector-mongodb
-  https://github.com/WebTales/alambic
-  https://github.com/AssoAlambic/alambic-website
-  https://bitbucket.org/nayoub/alambic.git
-  https://github.com/Alexandru-Dobre/alambic-connector-rest
-  https://github.com/WebTales/alambic-connector-diffbot
-  https://github.com/WebTales/alambic-connector-firebase

There are obviously many projects and repositories that embed the word alambic, and we will need to be a bit more specific if we are to identify the origin actually related to the alambic project.

If we want to know more about a specific origin, we can simply use the url attribute (or any known URL) as an entry for any of the origin endpoints.

Search for a specific origin#

Now say that we want to query the database for the specific repository of Alambic, to know what information has been registered by the archive. The API endpoint can be found in the swh-web documentation, and has the following syntax:

/api/1/origin/<origin_url>/get/

Which returns the same type of JSON object than the search command seen previously:

  • origin_visits_url attribute is an URL that points to the API page listing all visits (bot fetches) to this repository.

  • url is the url of the origin, or repository, itself.

We know that Alambic is hosted at ‘borisbaldassari/alambic’, so the API call will look like this:

/api/1/origin/https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic/get/

resp = requests.get("https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/origin/https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic/get/")
found = resp.json()
jprint(found)

{
    "origin_visits_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/origin/https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic/visits/",
    "url": "https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic"
}

Get visits information#

We can use the origin_visits_url attribute to know more about when the repository was analysed by the archive bots. The API endpoint is fully documented on the Software Heritage doc site, and has the following syntax:

/api/1/origin/<origin_url>/visits/

We will use the same query as before about the main Alambic repository.

resp = requests.get("https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/origin/https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic/visits/")
found = resp.json()
length = len(found)
print(f"Number of visits found: {format(length)}.")
print("With dates:")
for visit in found:
    print(f"- {visit['visit']} {visit['date']}")
print("\nExample of a single visit entry:")
jprint(found[0])

Number of visits found: 5.
With dates:
- 5 2021-01-01T19:35:41.308336+00:00
- 4 2020-02-06T10:41:45.700641+00:00
- 3 2019-09-01T22:38:12.056537+00:00
- 2 2019-06-16T04:52:18.162914+00:00
- 1 2019-01-30T07:19:20.799217+00:00

Example of a single visit entry:
{
    "date": "2021-01-01T19:35:41.308336+00:00",
    "metadata": {},
    "origin": "https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic",
    "origin_visit_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/origin/https://github.com/borisbaldassari/alambic/visit/5/",
    "snapshot": "6436d2c9b06cf9bd9efb0b4e463c3fe6b868eadc",
    "snapshot_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/snapshot/6436d2c9b06cf9bd9efb0b4e463c3fe6b868eadc/",
    "status": "full",
    "type": "git",
    "visit": 5
}

Get the content#

As defined in the beginning, a snapshot is a capture of the repository at a given time with links to all branches and releases. In this example we will work on the snapshot ID of the last visit to Alambic, as returned by the previous command we executed.

# Store snapshot id
snapshot = found[0]['snapshot']
print(f"Snapshot is {format(snapshot)}.")

Snapshot is 6436d2c9b06cf9bd9efb0b4e463c3fe6b868eadc.

Note that the latest visit to the repository can also be directly retrieved using the dedicated endpoint /api/1/origin/visit/latest/.

Get the snapshot#

We want now to retrieve the content of the project at this snapshot. For that purpose there is the snapshot endpoint, and its documentation is provided here. The complete syntax is:

/api/1/snapshot/<snapshot_id>/

The snapshot endpoint returns in the branches attribute a list of revisions (aka commits in a git context), which themselves point to the set of directories and files in the branch at the time of analysis. Let’s follow this chain of links, starting with the snapshot’s list of revisions (branches):

snapshotr = requests.get("https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/snapshot/{}/".format(snapshot))
snapshotj = snapshotr.json()
jprint(snapshotj)

{
    "branches": {
        "HEAD": {
            "target": "refs/heads/master",
            "target_type": "alias",
            "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/6dd0504b43b4459d52e9f13f71a91cc0fc445a19/"
        },
        "refs/heads/devel": {
            "target": "e298b8c5692b18928013a68e41fd185419515075",
            "target_type": "revision",
            "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/e298b8c5692b18928013a68e41fd185419515075/"
        },
        "refs/heads/features/cr152_anonymise_data": {
            "target": "ba3e0dcbfa0cb212a7186e9e62efb6dafe7fe162",
            "target_type": "revision",
            "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/ba3e0dcbfa0cb212a7186e9e62efb6dafe7fe162/"
        },
        "refs/heads/features/cr164_github_project": {
            "target": "0005abb080e4c67a97533ee923e9d28142877752",
            "target_type": "revision",
            "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/0005abb080e4c67a97533ee923e9d28142877752/"
        },
        "refs/heads/features/cr165_github_its": {
            "target": "0005abb080e4c67a97533ee923e9d28142877752",
            "target_type": "revision",
            "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/0005abb080e4c67a97533ee923e9d28142877752/"
        },
        "refs/heads/features/cr89_gitlabwizard": {
            "target": "b941fd5f93a6cfc2349358b891e47d0fffe0ed2d",
            "target_type": "revision",
            "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/b941fd5f93a6cfc2349358b891e47d0fffe0ed2d/"
        },
        "refs/heads/master": {
            "target": "6dd0504b43b4459d52e9f13f71a91cc0fc445a19",
            "target_type": "revision",
            "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/6dd0504b43b4459d52e9f13f71a91cc0fc445a19/"
        }
    },
    "id": "6436d2c9b06cf9bd9efb0b4e463c3fe6b868eadc",
    "next_branch": null
}

Get the root directory#

The revision associated to the branch can be retrieved by following the corresponding link in the target_url attribute. We will follow the refs/heads/master branch and get the associated revision object. In this case (a git repository) the revision is equivalent to a commit, with an ID and message.

print(f"Revision ID is {snapshotj['id']}.")
master_url = snapshotj['branches']['refs/heads/master']['target_url']
masterr = requests.get(master_url)
masterj = masterr.json()
jprint(masterj)

Revision ID is 6436d2c9b06cf9bd9efb0b4e463c3fe6b868eadc
{
    "author": {
        "email": "boris.baldassari@gmail.com",
        "fullname": "Boris Baldassari <boris.baldassari@gmail.com>",
        "name": "Boris Baldassari"
    },
    "committer": {
        "email": "boris.baldassari@gmail.com",
        "fullname": "Boris Baldassari <boris.baldassari@gmail.com>",
        "name": "Boris Baldassari"
    },
    "committer_date": "2020-11-01T12:55:13+01:00",
    "date": "2020-11-01T12:55:13+01:00",
    "directory": "fd9fe3477db3b9b7dea63509832b3fa99bdd7eb8",
    "directory_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/directory/fd9fe3477db3b9b7dea63509832b3fa99bdd7eb8/",
    "extra_headers": [],
    "history_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/6dd0504b43b4459d52e9f13f71a91cc0fc445a19/log/",
    "id": "6dd0504b43b4459d52e9f13f71a91cc0fc445a19",
    "merge": false,
    "message": "#163 Fix dygraphs zero padding in forums plugin.\n",
    "metadata": {},
    "parents": [
        {
            "id": "a4a2d8925c1cc43612602ac28e4ca9a31728b151",
            "url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/a4a2d8925c1cc43612602ac28e4ca9a31728b151/"
        }
    ],
    "synthetic": false,
    "type": "git",
    "url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/revision/6dd0504b43b4459d52e9f13f71a91cc0fc445a19/"
}

The revision references the root directory of the project. We can list all files and directories at the root by requesting more information from the directory_url attribute. The endpoint is documented here and has the following syntax:

/api/1/directory/<directory_id>/

The structure of the response is an array of directory entries. Content entries are represented like this:

{
    "checksums": {
        "sha1": "5973b582bfaeffa71c924e3fe7150620230391d8",
        "sha1_git": "a6c4d5ebfdf88b3b1a65996f6c438c01bf60740b",
        "sha256": "8761f1e1fd96fc4c86ad343a7c19ecd51c0bde4d7055b3315c3975b31ec61bbc"
    },
    "dir_id": "3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200",
    "length": 101,
    "name": ".dockerignore",
    "perms": 33188,
    "status": "visible",
    "target": "a6c4d5ebfdf88b3b1a65996f6c438c01bf60740b",
    "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/content/sha1_git:a6c4d5ebfdf88b3b1a65996f6c438c01bf60740b/",
    "type": "file"
}

And directory entries are represented with:

{
    "dir_id": "3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200",
    "length": null,
    "name": "doc",
    "perms": 16384,
    "target": "316468df4988351911992ecbf1866f1c1f575c23",
    "target_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/directory/316468df4988351911992ecbf1866f1c1f575c23/",
    "type": "dir"
}

We will print the list of contents and directories located at the root of the repository at the time of analysis:

root_url = masterj['directory_url']
rootr = requests.get(root_url)
rootj = rootr.json()
for f in rootj:
    print(f"- {f['name']}.")

- .dockerignore
- .env
- .gitignore
- CODE_OF_CONDUCT.html
- CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
- LICENCE.html
- LICENCE.md
- Readme.md
- doc
- docker
- docker-compose.run.yml
- docker-compose.test.yml
- dockercfg.encrypted
- mojo
- resources

We could follow the links up (or down) to the leaves in order to rebuild the project structure and download all files individually to rebuild the project locally. However the archive can do it for us, and provides a feature to download the content of a whole project in one step: cooking. The feature is described in the swh-vault documentation.

Download content of a project#

When we ask the Archive to cook a directory for us, it invokes an asynchronous job to recuversively fetch the directories and files of the project, following the graph up to the leaves (files) and exporting the result as a tar.gz file. This procedure is handled by the swh-vault component, and it’s all automatic.

Order the meal#

A cooking job can be invoked for revisions, directories or snapshots (soon). It is initiated with a POST request on the vault/<type>/ endpoint, and its complete syntax is:

/api/1/vault/directory/<directory_id>/

The first POST request initiates the cooking, and subsequent GET requests can fetch the job result and download the archive. See the Software Heritage documentation <vault-primer> on this, with useful examples. The API endpoint is documented here.

In this example we will fetch the content of the root directory that we previously identified.

mealr = requests.post("https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/directory/3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/")
mealj = mealr.json()
jprint(mealj)

{
    "fetch_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/directory/3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/raw/",
    "id": 379321799,
    "obj_id": "3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200",
    "obj_type": "directory",
    "progress_message": null,
    "status": "done"
}

Ask if it’s ready#

We can use a GET request on the same URL to get information about the process status:

statusr = requests.get("https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/directory/3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/")
statusj = statusr.json()
jprint(statusj)

{
    "fetch_url": "https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/directory/3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/raw/",
    "id": 379321799,
    "obj_id": "3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200",
    "obj_type": "directory",
    "progress_message": null,
    "status": "done"
}

Get the plate#

Once the processing is finished (it can take up to a few minutes) the tar.gz archive can be downloaded through the fetch_url link, and extracted as a tar.gz archive:

boris@castalia:downloads$ curl https://archive.softwareheritage.org/api/1/vault/directory/3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/raw/ -o myarchive.tar.gz
  % Total    % Received % Xferd  Average Speed   Time    Time     Time  Current
                                 Dload  Upload   Total   Spent    Left  Speed
100 9555k  100 9555k    0     0  1459k      0  0:00:06  0:00:06 --:--:-- 1717k
boris@castalia:downloads$ ls
myarchive.tar.gz
boris@castalia:downloads$ tar xzf myarchive.tar.gz
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/.dockerignore
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/.env
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/.gitignore
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.html
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/LICENCE.html
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/LICENCE.md
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/Readme.md
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/doc/
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/doc/Readme.md
3ee1366c6dd0b7f4ba9536e9bcc300236ac8f200/doc/config
[SNIP]

Conclusion#

In this article, we learned how to explore and use the Software Heritage archive using its API: searching for a repository, identifying projects and downloading specific snapshots of a repository. There is a lot more to the Archive and its API than what we have seen, and all features are generously documented on the Software Heritage web site.

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