Designing the architecture

Just SQLite as the database, keeping in mind that this is a simple project to learn more about various concepts. I want to keep things very straightforward and easy to understand.

The following command will set up everything you need, including the API and file server

fresh api --root=/var/fresh/data --domain=storage.aelpxy.dev

I'm also planning to add a config.toml configuration file, which will look something like this

# storage config
[storage]
path = "/var/fresh/data"  # path to store data
chunk_size = 1024         # in bytes

# api config
[api]
domain = "storage.aelpxy.dev"     # domain to serve on
tls = "enabled"                   # TLS: enabled or disabled
web = true                        # web ui support (yes, there will be a web interface!)
jwt_secret = "aVerySecureSecret"  # jwt secret
aes_secret = "32bitsecret"        # secure secret key

# auth config
[auth]
username = ""                     # username for authentication
password = ""                     # password (only supports argon2 hashes)

# web server config
[serve]
host = "0.0.0.0"                  # bind to all IP addresses
port = 5000                       # web server port (ignored if TLS is enabled)
folder = "./static-files"         # folder for static files
static_site = false               # enable static site serving (set to true for static apps)
tls = "enabled"                   # TLS: enabled or disabled
domain = "static.aelpxy.dev"      # static web server domain
cert_dir = "/var/fresh/certs"     # directory where TLS certificates will be stored

Filesystem

/data/
  ├── storage.db # stores data about buckets and its objects
  └── assets/
       ├── metadata.msgpack # stores lookups and access keys
       ├── image.jpg
       └── icons/
             ├── img1.png
             └── img2.png

What's happening is that the root folder can contain multiple buckets, along with a main storage.db file, which serves as the root SQLite database used to store information about the buckets.

A Bucket is an actual folder on the system that stores metadata about objects in MessagePack format, as well as the objects themselves. The MessagePack file maps files and hashes for faster lookups. Each bucket contains objects, which can be either a file or a folder.

The metadata for each object is stored in a corresponding MessagePack file residing in the bucket, named metadata.msgpack.

It may seem like using JSON for storing the filesystem is the best idea, but here's the thing: JSON is text-based, while MessagePack is binary. As a result, MessagePack is typically faster and more compact to serialize and deserialize compared to JSON.

MessagePack will provide better performance for large datasets, which we will definitely deal with. There are also benefits in terms of space efficiency. While it may not seem like a huge deal, large amounts of data can quickly take up a significant amount of space.

+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                               Root Filesystem (Data folder)                                  |
|                                                                                              |
|   ____________________    ____________________    ________________________________________   |
|  |      Bucket A      |  |      Bucket 2      |  |             a-large-bucket             |  |
|  |--------------------|  |--------------------|  |                                        |  |
|  | +----------------+ |  | +-----------+      |  | folder/                                |  |
|  | | object-img.png | |  | | Directory |      |  |    |-/assets.zip                       |  |
|  | +----------------+ |  | +-----------+      |  | folder2/                               |  |
|  |                    |  |       |            |  |    |-/files                            |  |
|  | +----------------+ |  | +----------------+ |  |    |     |-/icon.png                   |  |
|  | | object-111.zip | |  | | movie-file.zip | |  |    |     |-/icon2.png                  |  |
|  | +----------------+ |  | +----------------+ |  |    |-/icon3.png                        |  |
|  |____________________|  |____________________|  |________________________________________|  |
|                                                                                              |
+----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
> authors note: this was painful to type out.

Moving forward

I will probably actually never finish writing the actual code.

thoughts

opinionated thoughts (whatever comes to my mind)