swh.deposit 2.2.3

Software Heritage deposit server

Simple Web-Service Offering Repository Deposit (S.W.O.R.D) is an interoperability standard for digital file deposit.

This repository is both the SWORD v2 Server and a deposit command-line client implementations.

This implementation allows interaction between a client (a repository) and a server (SWH repository) to deposit software source code archives and associated metadata.

Description

Most of the software source code artifacts present in the SWH Archive are gathered by the mean of loader workers run by the SWH project from source code origins identified by lister workers. This is a pull mechanism: it’s the responsibility of the SWH project to gather and collect source code artifacts that way.

Alternatively, SWH allows its partners to push source code artifacts and metadata directly into the Archive with a push-based mechanism. By using this possibility different actors, holding software artifacts or metadata, can preserve their assets without having to pass through an intermediate collaborative development platform, which is already harvested by SWH (e.g GitHub, Gitlab, etc.).

This mechanism is the deposit.

The main idea is the deposit is an authenticated access to an API allowing the user to provide source code artifacts – with metadata – to be ingested in the SWH Archive. The result of that is a SWHID that can be used to uniquely and persistently identify that very piece of source code.

This unique identifier can then be used to reference the source code (e.g. in a scientific paper) and retrieve it using the vault feature of the SWH Archive platform.

The differences between a piece of code uploaded using the deposit rather than simply asking SWH to archive a repository using the save code now feature are:

• a deposited artifact is provided from one of the SWH partners which is regarded as a trusted authority,

• a deposited artifact requires metadata properties describing the source code artifact,

• a deposited artifact has a codemeta metadata entry attached to it,

• a deposited artifact has the same visibility on the SWH Archive than a collected repository,

• a deposited artifact can be searched with its provided url property on the SWH Archive,

• the deposit API uses the SWORD v2 API, thus requires some tooling to send deposits to SWH. These tools are provided with this repository.

See the User Manual page for more details on how to use the deposit client command line tools to push a deposit in the SWH Archive.

See the API Documentation reference pages of the SWORDv2 API implementation in swh.deposit if you want to do upload deposits using HTTP requests.

Read the Deposit metadata chapter to get more details on what metadata are supported when doing a deposit.

See Running swh-deposit locally if you want to hack the code of the swh.deposit module.

See Production deployment if you want to deploy your own copy of the swh.deposit stack.