Welcome to StackSync!

NOTE: This is BETA quality code!

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Architecture
• Swift REST API
  • Differences between V1 and V2
• Requirements
• Installation instructions
• Uninstallation intructions
• Issue Tracking
• Licensing
• Contact

Introduction

StackSync (http://stacksync.com) is a scalable open source Personal Cloud that implements the basic components to create a synchronization tool.

Architecture

In general terms, StackSync can be divided into three main blocks: clients (desktop and mobile), synchronization service (SyncService) and storage service (Swift, Amazon S3, FTP...). An overview of the architecture with the main components and their interaction is shown in the following image.

The StackSync client and the SyncService interact through the communication middleware called ObjectMQ. The sync service interacts with the metadata database. The StackSync client directly interacts with the storage back-end to upload and download files.

As storage back-end we are using OpenStack Swift, an open source cloud storage software where you can store and retrieve lots of data in virtual containers. It's based on the Cloud Files offering from Rackspace. But it is also possible to use other storage back-ends, such as a FTP server or S3.

Swift REST API

This is a module for OpenStack Swift. It's aim is to simulate StackSync behaviour with a simple REST API for mobile and web applications.

In the docs folder there is the API specification. There are two different APIs documents. This code implements V1 since V2 is not developed yet, but we have ready the specification.

Differences between V1 and V2

Main differences are:

• V1 code is hard to follow and it is bad structured. We started with some simple features but then we stated adding new functionalities until we finally get a huge file with horrible code.
• V1 is too inefficient since it has to create chunks and communicate with SyncService.
• Besides V2, V1 is not a real REST API!

With API v2 we want to solve all these problems.

Requirements

• Python-magic library to obtain files mimetype:

    $ sudo apt-get install pip
    $ sudo pip install python-magic
  

Installation instructions

1. Install StackSync REST API with:

    $ sudo python setup.py install
   

2. Alter your proxy-server.conf pipeline to enable apiweb:

From:

    [pipeline:main]
    pipeline = healthcheck cache authtoken keystone proxy-server

To:

    [pipeline:main]
    pipeline = healthcheck cache authtoken keystone apiweb proxy-server

3. Add to your proxy-server.conf the section for the StackSync WSGI filter::

    [filter:apiweb] 
    use = egg:apiweb#apiweb
    rpc_server_ip = SERVER_IP
    rpc_server_port = SERVER_PORT
   

If rpc_server_ip and rpc_server_port are not defined the default values will be 127.0.0.1 and 61234.

4. Restart the proxy:

    $ sudo swift-init proxy restart
   

Uninstallation instructions

1. Change the pipeline of the proxy-server.conf again to disable the stacksync module.

From:

    [pipeline:main] 
    pipeline = healthcheck cache authtoken keystone apiweb proxy-server 

To:

    [pipeline:main] 
    pipeline = healthcheck cache authtoken keystone proxy-server 

2. Restart the proxy:

    $ sudo swift-init proxy restart
   

Issue Tracking

For the moment, we are going to use the github issue tracking.

Licensing

StackSync is licensed under the GPLv3. Check license.txt for the latest licensing information.

Contact

Visit www.stacksync.com to contact information.