Software Heritage - Vault#
User-facing service that allows to retrieve parts of the archive as self-contained bundles (e.g., individual releases, entire repository snapshots, etc.) The creation of a bundle is called “cooking” a bundle.
Architecture#
The vault is made of two main parts:
a stateful RPC server called the backend
Celery tasks, called cookers
The Vault backend#
The Vault backend is the RPC server other Software Heritage components (mainly swh-web) interact with.
It is in charge of receiving cooking requests, scheduling corresponding tasks (via swh-scheduler and Celery), getting heartbeats and final results from these, cooking tasks, and finally serving the results.
It uses the same RPC protocol as the other components of the archive, and
its interface is described in swh.vault.interface.
The cookers#
Cookers are Python modules/classes, each in charge of cooking a type of bundle.
The main ones are swh.vault.cookers.directory for flat tarballs of directories,
and swh.vault.cookers.git_bare for bare .git repositories of any
type of git object.
They all derive from swh.vault.cookers.base.BaseVaultCooker.
The base cooker first notifies the backend the cooking task is in progress, then runs the cooker (which does the bundle-specific handling and uploads the result), then notifies the backend of the final result (success/failure).
Cookers may notify the backend of the progress, so they can be displayed in swh-web’s vault interface, which polls the status from the vault backend.