Buffy

Versioning and caching kinda-proxy for decoupling external HTTP resources

Maintainer: Tim Bleimehl

Status: alpha (WIP - do not use productive yet)

Source: https://git.connect.dzd-ev.de/dzdpythonmodules/buffy

User documentation: https://dzd-ev.github.io/buffy-docs.github.io/

Public issue tracker: https://github.com/dzd-ev/buffy-docs.github.io/issues

• Buffy
  • What is this?
  • Features
  • Intended purpose
  • Clients
  • Quick Start Client
    • Install Buffy
    • Example
  • Quick Start Server
    • Requirements
    • Server start
    • Connecting the BuffyPyClient

What is this?

Buffy is a server/client framework to buffer/cache your http requests.
Buffy decouples your dependency on external webservers that are not under your control.
Buffy manages HTTP downloads in the background. You can ignore any issues with external webservers and just focus on your application.

Features

• Caching of remote http resources (a.k.a. files you downloaded from the web)
• Versioning of remote http resources
• Managing of remote http resources with grouping, tagging and pinning
• Background pre-download of remote http resources
• "Smart"-Downloader
  • Resume broken downloads
  • Retry corrupted downloads

Intended purpose

• Make your software resiliant against changing (transformation,discontinuation,outage,...) external http resources
• Dampen load on external servers - prevent 429 Too Many Requests errors
• Pre-cache long running downloads before you need them

Clients

At the moment there is only a python client library.
But the Buffy-server has a REST API that can be consumed from any coding language.

You are very welcome to contribute a client in your language 👋😃

Quick Start Client

Lets have a small example how your Buffy client code could look like.

Install Buffy

pip install DZDBuffy

Example

Lets write some code using the Buffy client

from buffy.buffypyclient import BuffyPyClient

# connect to Buffy-server
c = BuffyPyClient(ssl=False)

# create a request
req = c.create_request(
    url="https://ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/baseline/pubmed22n0003.xml.gz"
)

# save requested file
req.download_response_content_to(dir="/tmp")

This is all it takes to request a file. Next time the webserver at ftp.ncbi.nlm.nih.go should be down the buffy client will just serve you the cached answer. Should your Buffy-server be down, the client will fall back to direct downloading the request from the source.

See the documenation for more detailed examples on how to use the client

Quick Start Server

Requirements

• Docker
• Docker-compose

Server start

• Download the buffy docker-compose file

wget -O docker-compose.yaml https://git.connect.dzd-ev.de/dzdpythonmodules/buffy/-/raw/main/docker-compose.yaml?inline=false

• Start the Buffy-server with docker compose

docker-compose up -d

Connecting the BuffyPyClient

Create a python script.

# connect to Buffy-server
from buffy.buffypyclient import BuffyPyClient

# connect to Buffy-server
c = BuffyPyClient(host="localhost", port=8008, ssl=False)

See the documentation for more detailed examples on how to use the client