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Package Loader Tutorial#

In this tutorial, we will see how to write a loader for Software Heritage that loads packages from a package manager, such as PyPI or Debian’s.

First, you should be familiar with Python, unit-testing, Software Heritage’s Data model and Software Architecture, and go through the Developer setup.

Creating the files hierarchy#

Once this is done, you should create a new directory (ie. a (sub)package from Python’s point of view) for you loader. It can be either a subdirectory of swh-loader-core/swh/loader/package/ like the other package loaders, or it can be in its own package.

If you choose the latter, you should also create the base file of any Python package (such as setup.py), you should import them from the swh-py-template repository.

In the rest of this tutorial, we will assume you chose the former and your loader is named “New Loader”, so your package loader is in swh-loader-core/swh/loader/package/newloader/.

Next, you should create boilerplate files needed for SWH loaders: __init__.py, tasks.py, tests/__init__.py, and tests/test_tasks.py; copy them from an existing package, such as swh-loader-core/swh/loader/package/pypi/, and replace the names in those with your loader’s.

Finally, create an entrypoint in setup.py, so your loader can be discovered by the SWH Celery workers:

entry_points="""
    [swh.workers]
    loader.newloader=swh.loader.package.newloader:register
""",

Writing a minimal loader#

It is now time for the interesting part: writing the code to load packages from a package manager into the Software Heritage archive.

Create a file named loader.py in your package’s directory, with two empty classes (replace the names with what you think is relevant):

from typing import Optional

import attr

from swh.loader.package.loader import BasePackageInfo, PackageLoader
from swh.model.model import Person, Release, Sha1Git, TimestampWithTimezone


@attr.s
class NewPackageInfo(BasePackageInfo):
    pass

class NewLoader(PackageLoader[NewPackageInfo]):
    visit_type = "newloader"

We now have to fill some of the methods declared by swh.loader.package.PackageLoader: in your new NewLoader class.

Listing versions#

get_versions should return the list of names of all versions of the origin defined at self.url by the default constructor; and get_default_version should return the name of the default version (usually the latest stable release).

They are both implemented with an API call to the package repository. For example, for PyPI origin https://pypi.org/project/requests, this is done with a request to https://pypi.org/pypi/requests/json.

Getting package information#

Next, get_package_info takes as argument a version name (as returned by get_versions) and yields (branch_name, p_info) tuples, where branch_name is a string and pkg_info is an instance of the NewPackageInfo class we defined earlier.

Each of these tuples should match a single file the loader will download from the origin. Usually, there is only one file per versions, but this is not true for all package repositories (eg. CRAN and PyPI allow multiple version artifacts per version).

As NewPackageInfo derives from swh.loader.package.BasePackageInfo, it can be created like this:

return NewPackageInfo(url="https://...", filename="...-versionX.Y.tar.gz")

The url must be a URL where to download the archive from. filename is optional, but it is nice to fill it when possible/relevant.

The base PackageLoader will then take care of calling get_versions() to get all the versions, then call get_package_info() get the list of archives to download, download them, and load all the directories in the archive.

This means you do not need to manage downloads yourself; and we are now done with interactions with the package repository.

Building a release#

The final step for your minimal loader to work, is to implement build_release. This is a very important part, as it will create a release object that will be inserted in Software Heritage, as a link between origins and the directories.

This function takes three important arguments:

  • p_info is an object returned by get_package_info()

  • uncompressed_path is the location on the disk where the base PackageLoader extracted the archive, so you can access files from the archive.

  • directory is an intrinsic identifier of the directory that was loaded from the archive

The way to implement it depends very much on how the package manager works, but here is a rough idea:

def build_release(
    self, p_info: NewPackageInfo, uncompressed_path: str, directory: Sha1Git
) -> Optional[Release]:
    author = Person(name="Jane Doe", email="jdoe@example.org")
    date = TimestampWithTimezone.from_iso8601("2021-04-01T11:55:20Z")

    return Release(
        name="v2.0.0",
        message="This is a new release of the project",
        author=author,
        date=date,
        target=directory,
        target_type=ObjectType.DIRECTORY,
        synthetic=True,
    )

The strings here are placeholders, and you should extract them from either the extracted archive (using uncompressed_path), or from the package repository’s API; see the existing specifications for examples of values to use.

The various classes used in this example are swh.model.model.Person, swh.model.model.TimestampWithTimezone, and swh.model.model.Release.

Note that you have access to the NewPackageInfo object created by get_package_info(), so you can extend the NewPackageInfo class to pass data between these two functions.

A few caveats:

  • Make sure the timezone matches the source’s

  • Person can also be built with just a fullname, if there aren’t distinct fields for name and email. When in doubt, it’s better to just write the fullname than try to parse it

  • author and committer (resp. date and committer_date) may be different if the release was written and published by different people (resp. dates). This is only relevant when loading from VCS, so you can usually ignore it in you package loader.

Running your loader#

With Docker#

We recommend you use our Docker environment to test your loader.

In short, install Docker, cd to swh-environment/docker/, then edit docker-compose.override.yml to insert your new loader in the Docker environment, something like this will do:

version: '2'

services:
  swh-loader-core:
    volumes:
      - "$HOME/swh-environment/swh-loader-core:/src/swh-loader-core"

Then start the Docker environment:

docker-compose start

Then, you can run your loader:

docker-compose exec swh-loader swh loader run newloader "https://example.org/~jdoe/project/"

where newloader is the name you registered as an entrypoint in setup.py and https://example.org/~jdoe/project/ is the origin URL, that will be set as the self.url attribute of your loader.

For example, to run the PyPI loader, the command would be:

docker-compose exec swh-loader swh loader run pypi "https://pypi.org/project/requests/"

If you get this error, make sure you properly configured docker-compose.override.yml:

Error: Invalid value for '[...]': invalid choice: newloader

Without Docker#

If you do not want to use the Docker environment, you will need to start an Software Heritage - Storage instance yourself, and create a config file that references it:

storage:
  cls: remote
  url: http://localhost:5002/

Or alternatively, this more efficient configuration:

storage:
  cls: pipeline
  steps:
    - cls: buffer
      min_batch_size:
        content: 10000
        content_bytes: 104857600
        directory: 1000
        release: 1000
    - cls: filter
    - cls: remote
      url: http://localhost:5002/

And run your loader with:

swh loader -C loader.yml run newloader "https://example.org/~jdoe/project/"

where newloader is the name you registered as an entrypoint in setup.py and https://example.org/~jdoe/project/ is the origin URL, that will be set as the self.url attribute of your loader.

For example, with PyPI:

swh loader -C loader.yml run pypi "https://pypi.org/project/requests/"

Testing your loader#

You must write tests for your loader.

First, of course, unit tests for the internal functions of your loader, if any (eg. the functions used to extract metadata); but this is not covered in this tutorial.

Most importantly, you should write integration tests for your loader, that will simulate an origin, run the loader, and check everything is loaded in the storage as it should be.

As we do not want tests to directly query an origin (it makes tests flaky, hard to reproduce, and put unnecessary load on the origin), we usually mock it using the swh.core.pytest_plugin.requests_mock_datadir() fixture

It works by creating a data/ folder in your tests (such as swh/loader/package/newloader/tests/data/) and downloading results from API calls there, in the structured documented in swh.core.pytest_plugin.requests_mock_datadir_factory()

The files in the datadir/ will then be served whenever the loader tries to access an URL. This is very dependent on the kind of repositories your loader will read from, so here is an example with the PyPI loader.

The files swh/loader/package/pypi/tests/data/https_pypi.org/pypi_nexter_json and swh/loader/package/pypi/tests/data/https_files.pythonhosted.org/nexter-* are used in this test:

from swh.loader.tests import assert_last_visit_matches, check_snapshot, get_stats

def test_pypi_visit_1_release_with_2_artifacts(swh_storage, requests_mock_datadir):
    # Initialize the loader
    url = "https://pypi.org/project/nexter"
    loader = PyPILoader(swh_storage, url)

    # Run the loader, with a swh-storage instance, on the given URL.
    # HTTP calls will be mocked by the requests_mock_datadir fixture
    actual_load_status = loader.load()

    # Check the loader loaded exactly the snapshot we expected
    # (when writing your tests for the first time, you cannot know the
    # snapshot id without running your loader; so let it error and write
    # down the result here)
    expected_snapshot_id = hash_to_bytes("1394b2e59351a944cc763bd9d26d90ce8e8121a8")
    assert actual_load_status == {
        "status": "eventful",
        "snapshot_id": expected_snapshot_id.hex(),
    }

    # Check the content of the snapshot. (ditto)
    expected_snapshot = Snapshot(
        id=expected_snapshot_id,
        branches={
            b"releases/1.1.0/nexter-1.1.0.zip": SnapshotBranch(
                target=hash_to_bytes("f7d43faeb65b64d3faa67e4f46559db57d26b9a4"),
                target_type=TargetType.RELEASE,
            ),
            b"releases/1.1.0/nexter-1.1.0.tar.gz": SnapshotBranch(
                target=hash_to_bytes("732bb9dc087e6015884daaebb8b82559be729b5a"),
                target_type=TargetType.RELEASE,
            ),
        },
    )
    check_snapshot(expected_snapshot, swh_storage)

    # Check the visit was properly created with the right type
    assert_last_visit_matches(
        swh_storage, url, status="full", type="pypi", snapshot=expected_snapshot.id
    )

    # Then you could check the directory structure:
    directory_id = swh_storage.release_get(
       [hash_to_bytes("f7d43faeb65b64d3faa67e4f46559db57d26b9a4")]
    )[0].target
    entries = list(swh_storage.directory_ls(directory_id, recursive=True))
    assert entries == [
        ...
    ]

Here are some scenarios you should test, when relevant:

  • No versions

  • One version

  • Two or more versions

  • More than one package per version, if relevant

  • Corrupt packages (missing metadata, …), if relevant

  • API errors

  • etc.

Making your loader incremental#

Important

In the previous sections, you wrote a fully functional loader for a new type of package repository. This is great! Please tell us about it, and submit it for review so we can give you some feedback early.

Now, we will see a key optimization for any package loader: skipping packages it already downloaded, using extids.

The rough idea it to find some way to uniquely identify packages before downloading them and encode it in a short string, the ExtID.

Using checksums#

Ideally, this short string is a checksum of the archive, provided by the API before downloading the archive itself. This is ideal, because this ensures that we detect changes in the package’s content even if it keeps the same name and version number. However, this is only usable when all fields used to generate release objects (message, authors, …) are extracted from the archive.

Important

If release objects are generated from extrinsic fields (ie. not extracted from the archive, such as authorship information added by the package repository) two different package versions with the same tarball would end up with the same release number; causing the loader to create incorrect snapshots.

If this is not the case of the repository you want to load from, skip to the next subsection.

This is used for example by the PyPI loader (with a sha256sum) and the NPM loader (with a sha1sum). The Debian loader uses a similar scheme: as a single package is assembled from a set of tarballs, it only uses the hash of the .dsc file, which itself contains a hash of all the tarballs.

This is implemented by overriding the extid method of you NewPackageInfo class, that returns the type of the ExtID (see below) and the ExtID itself:

from swh.loader.package.loader import PartialExtID

EXTID_TYPE: str = "pypi-archive-sha256"

@attr.s
class NewPackageInfo(BasePackageInfo):
    sha256: str

    def extid(self) -> PartialExtID:
        return (EXTID_TYPE, hash_to_bytes(self.sha256))

and the loader’s get_package_info method sets the right value in the sha256 attribute.

Using a custom manifest#

Unfortunately, this does not work for all packages, as some package repositories do not provide a checksum of the archives via their API. If this is the case of the repository you want to load from, you need to find a way around it.

It highly depends on the repository, so this tutorial cannot cover how to do it. We do however provide an easy option that should work in most cases: creating a “manifest” of the archive with some metadata in it, and hashing it.

For example, when loading from the GNU FTP servers, we have access to some metadata, that is somewhat good enough to deduplicate. We write them all in a string and hash that string.

It is done like this:

import string

@attr.s
class ArchivePackageInfo(BasePackageInfo):
    length = attr.ib(type=int)
    """Size of the archive file"""
    time = attr.ib(type=Union[str, datetime.datetime])
    """Timestamp of the archive file on the server"""
    version = attr.ib(type=str)

    EXTID_FORMAT = "package-manifest-sha256"

    MANIFEST_FORMAT = string.Template("$time $length $version $url")

The default implementation of swh.loader.package.loader.BasePackageInfo.extid() will read this template, substitute the variables based on the object’s attributes, compute the hash of the result, and return it.

Note that, as mentioned before, this is not perfect because a tarball may be replaced with a different tarball of exactly the same length and modification time, and we won’t detect it. But this is extremely unlikely, so we consider it to be good enough.

Important

The manifest must cover all fields used to generate Release objects.

Alternatively, if this is not good enough for your loader, you can simply not implement ExtIDs, and your loader will always load all tarballs. This can be bandwidth-heavy for both Software Heritage and the origin you are loaded from, so this decision should not be taken lightly.

Choosing the ExtID type#

The type of your ExtID should be a short ASCII string, that is both unique to your loader and descriptive of how it was computed.

Why unique to the loader? Because different loaders may load the same archive differently. For example, if I was to create an archive with both a PKG-INFO and a package.json file, and submit it to both NPM and PyPI, both package repositories would have exactly the same tarball. But the NPM loader would create the release based on authorship info in package.json, and the PyPI loader based on PKG-INFO. But we do not want the PyPI loader to assume it already created a release itself, while the release was created by the NPM loader!

And why descriptive? This is simply for future-proofing; in case your loader changes the format of the ExtID (eg. by using a different hash algorithm).

Testing your incremental loading#

If you followed the steps above, your loader is now able to detect what packages it already downloaded and skip them. This is what we call an incremental loader.

It is now time to write tests to make sure your loader fulfills this promise.

This time, we want to use requests_mock_datadir_visits instead of requests_mock_datadir, because we want to mock the repository’s API to emulate its results changing over time (eg. because a new version was published between two runs of the loader). See the documentation of swh.core.pytest_plugin.requests_mock_datadir_factory() for a description of the file layout to use.

Let’s take, once again, a look at swh/loader/package/pypi/tests/test_pypi.py, to use as an example:

def test_pypi_incremental_visit(swh_storage, requests_mock_datadir_visits):
    """With prior visit, 2nd load will result with a different snapshot

    """
    # Initialize the loader
    url = "https://pypi.org/project/0805nexter"
    loader = PyPILoader(swh_storage, url)

    # First visit
    visit1_actual_load_status = loader.load()
    visit1_stats = get_stats(swh_storage)

    # Make sure everything is in order
    expected_snapshot_id = hash_to_bytes("ba6e158ada75d0b3cfb209ffdf6daa4ed34a227a")
    assert visit1_actual_load_status == {
        "status": "eventful",
        "snapshot_id": expected_snapshot_id.hex(),
    }

    assert_last_visit_matches(
        swh_storage, url, status="full", type="pypi", snapshot=expected_snapshot_id
    )

    assert {
        "content": 6,
        "directory": 4,
        "origin": 1,
        "origin_visit": 1,
        "release": 0,
        "release": 2,
        "skipped_content": 0,
        "snapshot": 1,
    } == visit1_stats

    # Reset internal state
    del loader._cached__raw_info
    del loader._cached_info

    # Second visit
    visit2_actual_load_status = loader.load()
    visit2_stats = get_stats(swh_storage)

    # Check the result of the visit
    assert visit2_actual_load_status["status"] == "eventful", visit2_actual_load_status
    expected_snapshot_id2 = hash_to_bytes("2e5149a7b0725d18231a37b342e9b7c4e121f283")
    assert visit2_actual_load_status == {
        "status": "eventful",
        "snapshot_id": expected_snapshot_id2.hex(),
    }

    assert_last_visit_matches(
        swh_storage, url, status="full", type="pypi", snapshot=expected_snapshot_id2
    )

    assert {
        "content": 6 + 1,  # 1 more content
        "directory": 4 + 2,  # 2 more directories
        "origin": 1,
        "origin_visit": 1 + 1,
        "release": 2 + 1,  # 1 more release
        "revision": 0,
        "skipped_content": 0,
        "snapshot": 1 + 1,  # 1 more snapshot
    } == visit2_stats

    # Check all content objects were loaded
    expected_contents = map(
        hash_to_bytes,
        [
            "a61e24cdfdab3bb7817f6be85d37a3e666b34566",
            "938c33483285fd8ad57f15497f538320df82aeb8",
            "a27576d60e08c94a05006d2e6d540c0fdb5f38c8",
            "405859113963cb7a797642b45f171d6360425d16",
            "e5686aa568fdb1d19d7f1329267082fe40482d31",
            "83ecf6ec1114fd260ca7a833a2d165e71258c338",
            "92689fa2b7fb4d4fc6fb195bf73a50c87c030639",
        ],
    )

    assert list(swh_storage.content_missing_per_sha1(expected_contents)) == []

    # Check all directory objects were loaded
    expected_dirs = map(
        hash_to_bytes,
        [
            "05219ba38bc542d4345d5638af1ed56c7d43ca7d",
            "cf019eb456cf6f78d8c4674596f1c9a97ece8f44",
            "b178b66bd22383d5f16f4f5c923d39ca798861b4",
            "c3a58f8b57433a4b56caaa5033ae2e0931405338",
            "e226e7e4ad03b4fc1403d69a18ebdd6f2edd2b3a",
            "52604d46843b898f5a43208045d09fcf8731631b",
        ],
    )

    assert list(swh_storage.directory_missing(expected_dirs)) == []

    # etc.

Loading metadata#

Finally, an optional step: collecting and loading extrinsic metadata. This is metadata that your loader may collect while loading an origin. For example, the PyPI loader collects some parts of the API response (eg. https://pypi.org/pypi/requests/json)

They are stored as raw bytestring, along with a format (an ASCII string) and a date of discovery (usually the time your loader ran).

This is done by adding them to the directory_extrinsic_metadata attribute of your NewPackageInfo object when creating it in get_package_info as swh.loader.package.loader.RawExtrinsicMetadataCore objects:

NewPackageInfo(
    ...,
    directory_extrinsic_metadata=[
        RawExtrinsicMetadataCore(
            format="new-format",
            metadata=b"foo bar baz",
            discovery_date=datetime.datetime(...),
        )
    ]
)

format should be a human-readable ASCII string that unambiguously describes the format. Readers of the metadata object will have a built-in list of formats they understand, and will check if your metadata object is among them. You should use one of the known metadata formats if possible, or add yours to this list.

metadata is the metadata object itself. When possible, it should be copied verbatim from the source object you got, and should not be created by the loader. If this is not possible, for example because it is extracted from a larger JSON or XML document, make sure you do as little modifications as possible to reduce the risks of corruption.

discovery_date is optional, and defaults to the time your loader started working.

In theory, you can write extrinsic metadata on any kind of objects, eg. by implementing swh.loader.package.loader.PackageLoader.get_extrinsic_origin_metadata(), swh.loader.package.loader.PackageLoader.get_extrinsic_snapshot_metadata(); but this is rarely relevant in practice. Be sure to check if loader can find any potentially interesting metadata, though!

You also need to implement a new method on your loader class, to return information on where the metadata is coming from, called a metadata authority. This authority is identified by a URI, such as https://github.com/ for GitHub, https://pypi.org/ for PyPI, etc. For example:

from swh.model.model import MetadataAuthority, MetadataAuthorityType

def get_metadata_authority(self):
    return MetadataAuthority(
        type=MetadataAuthorityType.FORGE,
        url="https://pypi.org/",
    )

If your loader supports loading from different instances (like GitLab), you can define the authority dynamically based on the URL of the origin:

def get_metadata_authority(self):
    p_url = urlparse(self.url)
    return MetadataAuthority(
        type=MetadataAuthorityType.FORGE,
        url=f"{p_url.scheme}://{p_url.netloc}/",
    )

Checklist#

Before the final addition of a new loader, here is a list of things to check for. Most of them are a reminder of other sections above.

  • There is (or will be) a lister to trigger it

  • Tested with pytest, from scratch and incrementally (if relevant)

  • Tested in Docker, from scratch and incrementally (if relevant)

  • Release fields are consistent with the existing specifications, and you updated the specifications to add your loader. They must be explicitly tested.

  • Relevant metadata are loaded with as little processing as possible (ie. keep the original format unchanged, instead of converting it to a JSON/msgpack/… format) and their format is documented. They must tested as well.

  • The forge is present in the swh-docs software-origins list and the software-origins user documentation

  • There is no risk of extid clashes, even across instances (if relevant), even in presence of malicious actors (as far as reasonably possible)

Final words#

Congratulations, you made it to the end. If you have not already, please contact us to tell us about your new loader, and submit your loader for review on our forge so we can merge it and run it along our other loaders to archive more repositories.

And if you have any change in mind to improve this tutorial for future readers, please submit them too.

Thank you for your contributions!

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