Django Cloud Browser¶
- Info
A Django application browser for cloud (S3, Cloud Files) datastores.
- Author
Ryan Roemer (http://github.com/ryan-roemer)
- Build
- Version
Cloud Browser is a simple web-based object browser for cloud-based blob datastores. Just add as an application to a Django project, add some settings, and you’ll be able to browse cloud containers and implied subdirectories, as well as view / download objects.
Currently supported backend datastores include:
Local file system for testing.
Be sure to check out the following project resources:
Access Controls¶
Cloud Browser also has a very rudimentary set of access controls (presently white and black lists), so that you can expose a subset of cloud objects to a set of less-then-fully trusted users for read-only access without having to pass around the full cloud API account and secret key.
Nested File Browsing¶
One of the underlying motivations for this project is the current control panel for Rackspace Cloud Files that only allows listing of the flat object namespace within a container, without any nested hierarchy. When you get up to 5 million or so objects, it can be tedious / impracticable to search through results, even if you have carefully added delimiters (e.g., slashes) to your cloud objects names.
Accordingly, Cloud Browser correctly handles “implicit” or “pseudo” directories in the underlying flat namespace of cloud blob names (e.g., divides up an object called “long/path/with/slashes/to/foo.txt”), and allows viewing into the artificially nested hierarchy. Cloud object results are paged, and subsequent pages can be viewed at arbitrary object-per-page and starting points. Conveniently, URL paths can be inputted and linked to a starting point within a long list of results.