Launchpad

u1ftp: a demonstration of the Ubuntu One API

One of the projects I’ve been working on has been to improve aspects of the Ubuntu One Developer Documentation web site.  While there are still some layout problems we are working on, it is now in a state where it is a lot easier for us to update.

I have been working on updating our authentication/authorisation documentation and revising some of the file storage documentation (the API used by the mobile Ubuntu One clients).  To help verify that the documentation was useful, I wrote a small program to exercise those APIs.  The result is u1ftp: a program that exposes a user’s files via an FTP daemon running on localhost.  In conjunction with the OS file manager or a dedicated FTP client, this can be used to conveniently access your files on a system without the full Ubuntu One client installed.

You can download the program from:

https://launchpad.net/u1ftp/trunk/0.1/+download/u1ftp-0.1.zip

To make it easy to run on as many systems as possible, I packaged it up as a runnable zip file so can be run directly by the Python interpreter.  As well as a Python interpreter, you will need the following installed to run it:

  • On Linux systems, either the gnomekeyring extension (if you are using a GNOME derived desktop), or PyKDE4 (if you have a KDE derived desktop).
  • On Windows, you will need pywin32.
  • On MacOS X, you shouldn’t need any additional modules.

These could not be included in the zip file because they are extension modules rather than pure Python.

Once you’ve downloaded the program, you can run it with the following command:

python u1ftp-0.1.zip

This will start the FTP server listening at ftp://localhost:2121/.  Pointing a file manager at that URL should prompt you to log in, where you can use your standard Ubuntu One credentials and start browsing your files.  It will verify the credentials against the Ubuntu SSO service and issue an OAuth token that it stores in the keyring.  The OAuth token is then used to authenticate requests to the file storage REST API.

While I expect this program to be useful on its own, it was also intended to act as an example of how the Ubuntu One API can be used.  One way to browse the source is to simply unzip the package and poke around.  Alternatively, you can check out the source directly from Launchpad:

bzr branch lp:u1ftp

If you come up with an interesting extension to u1ftp, feel free to upload your changes as a branch on Launchpad.

Launchpad code scanned by Ohloh

Today Ohloh finished importing the Launchpad source code and produced the first source code analysis report.  There seems to be something fishy about the reported line counts (e.g. -3,291 lines of SQL), but the commit counts and contributor list look about right.  If you’re interested in what sort of effort goes into producing an application like Launchpad, then it is worth a look.

Ubuntu packages for Rygel

I promised Zeeshan that I’d have a look at his Rygel UPnP Media Server a few months back, and finally got around to doing so.  For anyone else who wants to give it a shot, I’ve put together some Ubuntu packages for Jaunty and Karmic in a PPA here:

Most of the packages there are just rebuilds or version updates of existing packages, but the Rygel ones were done from scratch.  It is the first Debian package I’ve put together from scratch and it wasn’t as difficult as I thought it might be.  The tips from the “Teach me packaging” workshop at the Canonical All Hands meeting last month were quite helpful.

After installing the package, you can configure it by running the “rygel-preferences” program.  The first notebook page lets you configure the transcoding support, and the second page lets you configure the various media source plugins.

I wasn’t able to get the Tracker plugin working on my system, which I think is due to Rygel expecting the older Tracker D-Bus API.  I was able to get the folder plugin working pretty easily though.

Once things were configured, I ran Rygel itself and an extra icon showed up on my PlayStation 3.  Getting folder listings was quite slow, but apparently this is limited to the folder back end and is currently being worked on.  It’s a shame I wasn’t able to test the more mature Tracker back end.

With LPCM transcoding enabled, I was able to successfully play a Vorbis file on the PS3.  With transcoding disabled, I wasn’t able to play any music — even files in formats the PS3 could handle natively.  This was apparently due to the folder backend not providing the necessary metadata.  I didn’t have any luck with MPEG2 transcoding for video.

It looks like Rygel has promise, but is not yet at a stage where it could replace something like MediaTomb.  The external D-Bus media source support looks particularly interesting.  I look forward to trying out version 0.4 when it is released.

django-openid-auth

Last week, we released the source code to django-openid-auth.  This is a small library that can add OpenID based authentication to Django applications.  It has been used for a number of internal Canonical projects, including the sprint scheduler Scott wrote for the last Ubuntu Developer Summit, so it is possible you’ve already used the code.

Rather than trying to cover all possible use cases of OpenID, it focuses on providing OpenID Relying Party support to applications using Django’s django.contrib.auth authentication system.  As such, it is usually enough to edit just two files in an existing application to enable OpenID login.

The library has a number of useful features:

  • As well as the standard method of prompting the user for an identity URL, you can configure a fixed OpenID server URL.  This is useful for deployments where OpenID is being used for single sign on, and you always want users to log in using a particular OpenID provider.  Rather than asking the user for their identity URL, they are sent directly to the provider.
  • It can be configured to automatically create accounts when new identity URLs are seen.
  • User names, full names and email addresses can be set on accounts based on data sent via the OpenID Simple Registration extension.
  • Support for Launchpad‘s Teams OpenID extension, which lets you query membership of Launchpad teams when authenticating against Launchpad’s OpenID provider.  Team memberships are mapped to Django group membership.

While the code can be used for generic OpenID login, we’ve mostly been using it for single sign on.  The hope is that it will help members of the Ubuntu and Launchpad communities reuse our authentication system in a secure fashion.

The source code can be downloaded using the following Bazaar command:

bzr branch lp:django-openid-auth

Documentation on how to integrate the library is available in the README.txt file.  The library includes some code written by Simon Willison for django-openid, and uses the same licensing terms (2 clause BSD) as that project.

Storm 0.13

Yesterday, Thomas rolled the 0.13 release of Storm, which can be downloaded from Launchpad.  Storm is the object relational mapper for Python used by Launchpad and Landscape, so it is capable of supporting quite large scale applications.  It is seven months since the last release, so there is a lot of improvements.  Here are a few simple statistics:

0.12 0.13 Change
Tarball size (KB) 117 155 38
Mainline revisions 213 262 49
Revisions in ancestry 552 875 323

So it is a fairly significant update by any of these metrics.  Among the new features are:

  • Infrastructure for tracing the SQL statements issued by Storm.  Sample tracer implementations are provided to implement bounded statement run times and for logging statements (both features used for QA of Launchpad).
  • A validation framework.  The property constructors take a validator keyword argument, which should be a function taking arguments (object, attr_name, value) and return the value to set.  If the function raises an exception, it can prevent a value from being set.  By returning something different to its third argument it can transform values.
  • The find() and ResultSet API has been extended to make it possible to generate queries that use GROUP BY and HAVING.  The primary use case for result sets that contain an object plus some aggregates associated with that object.
  • Some core parts of Storm have been accelerated through a C extension.  This code is turned off by default, but can be enabled by defining the STORM_CEXTENSIONS environment variable to 1.  While it is disabled by default, it is pretty stable.  Barring any serious problems reported over the next release cycle, I’d expect it to be enabled by default for the next release.
  • The minimum dependencies of the storm.zope.zstorm module have been reduced to just the zope.interface and transaction modules.  This makes it easier to use the per-thread store management code and global transaction management outside of Zope apps (e.g. for integrating with Django).

It doesn’t include my Django integration code though, since that isn’t fully baked.  I’ll post some more about that later.