Amazon's S3 storage service is a really cool way to store and serve up massive quantities of data. Interestingly, it is more like a database than like a file system. Despite the convenience of referring to an object like "/path/to/thing.jpg" S3 really does not have any separate objects for "/path" or "/path/to". In fact, neither "/path" nor "/path/to" even exist.
This is why, when you store an S3 object, the name it is given is called "key" instead of "filename". It functions like a database key, returning a file. However, as very "ultra hipster Web 2.0" as this may be, it is still convenient to browse a large collection of files by using a familiar directory/sub-directory/etc.
In fact, all of the S3 utilities that I use allow you to create a folder inside of a bucket, and sub-folders inside of that etc. But I did not see any programmatic facility for creating a folder independent of any object inside of S3. If you have been paying attention, you remember that in S3 there is no such thing as a directory! So how do these nice GUI browsers do it?
I did some Googling, but no luck, beyond "it couldn't be done". Since I had two different programs that already did it, I knew THAT wasn't the case. It took a little old-fashioned investigation... I looked directly at the output from a query to a bucket that had the little folders in them already.
Lo and behold, it turns out, they cheat, by creating a specially named object for each "directory". For a directory named "/path", you would create an object with the key "path_$folder$", and for a directory named "/path/to", you create an object with the key "path/to_$folder$". Then to get a directory listing for "/path" you just do a query on S3 for all object whose key starts with "/path". Ignore any objects that end with "_$folder$" and there you have it: S3 folders.
I decided that it would be nice if the aws/s3 gem would support this foldering the same way that copying a file within a file system does: if the enclosing directories do not exist, they are created before the file copy.
Thanks to the beauty of modern dynamic languages, I was easily able to put together a little monkeypatch for aws/S3 to the S3Object class, that handles this.
module AWS
module S3
class S3Object
class << self
alias :original_store :store
def store(key, data, bucket = nil, options = {})
store_folders(key, bucket, options) if options[:use_virtual_directories]
original_store(key, data, bucket, options)
end
def store_folders(key, bucket = nil, options = {})
folders = key.split("/")
folders.slice!(0)
folders.pop
current_folder = "/"
folders.each {|folder|
current_folder += folder
store_folder(current_folder, bucket, options)
current_folder += "/"
}
end
def store_folder(key, bucket = nil, options = {})
original_store(key + "_$folder$", "", bucket, options) end
end
end
end
end
Sure, you can have the best of both worlds: massive virtual storage, and a convenient directory-like structure. And now you can have it with your favorite Ruby S3 library.
Happy storage!
The demo that Microsoft showed at TED of Robert Scoble crying, ahem, I mean their future Microsoft Worldwide Telescope or whatever, looks really neat. In the meantime, those provocateurs over at Google have just put live Google Sky, a fully browser based version of their Google Earth software that started this whole "star wars" virtual astronomy competition thing in the first place.
