suitcasectl

README

Overview

SuitcaseCTL is a tool for packaging up research data in a standardized format (tar, tar.gz) with the following additional features:

• Optional GPG encryption, either on the archive itself, or the files within the archive
• Splitting a single directory in to multiple tar files. This allows for smaller files to be transported to the cloud, and allows for faster archive creation since the multiple archives are created in parallel
• “Inventory” file which contains hashes and locations of all files in the archives, along with optional metadata
• CLI metadata file that contains the options the archive was created with

Installation

Prebuilt Binaries

Prebuilt binaries are the preferred and easiest way to get suitcasectl on your host. If there is no available prebuilt option for your OS, please create a new issue and we'll get it in there!

Download a package from the releases page, or use the devil-ops package for homebrew, yum, etc.

Local builds

You can also use go install to download and build the latest commits to main (Or any other branch/tag)

$ go install gitlab.oit.duke.edu/devil-ops/suitcasectl/cmd/suitcasectl@main
...

Global Flags

-v or --verbose : Enable debug logs.

-t or --trace : Enable trace logs. This will include the file/line of the code that generated a given message.

--log-format : Either console or json (Default: console).

Components

When creating a new suitcase, several components are generated. Each is describe below.

Inventory

Inventory is a yaml or json file that contains a list of files that will be added to the suitcase, along with some additional metadata around them.

This will be a human readable file that can be used for future file retrieval. It is also used to generate the actual suitcase archive files.

Inventory Metadata

Arbitrary metadata can be included in the inventory file as well. This allows for data owners to add some special text describing the data. By default, anything in one of the top level directories that matches the glob suitcase-meta* will be included in the metadata. This is configurable with the --internal-metadata-glob 'new-glob*' flag.

You can also include metadata outside of the target directories with --external-metadata-file /tmp/some-file.txt. This argument can be used multiple times.

CLI Metadata

This is a yaml file that contains information about what was passed to the CLI. It will be created as cli-invocation-meta.yaml in the output directory.

CLI Output

The console output from the suitcasectl app will also be logged in json format to the directory containing the suitcases. This will be in a file called suitcasectl.log.

Hash Files

If --hash-outer or --hash-inner are specified on the CLI, hash files will be generated alongside everything else.

--hash-outer will generate hashes on the suitcases and the metadata files.

--hash-inner will generate hashes on the files inside of the suitcases.

Suitcases

Suitcases are the giant blob (or blobs) of all the data

Suitcase creation is done with the create suitcase subcommand. Some useful arguments are:

Generic Example

❯ suitcasectl create suitcase ~/Desktop/example-suitcase/ -o /tmp --suitcase-format ".tar.gpg" --max-suitcase-size="3.5Mb" --user=foo
5:35PM INF No inventory file specified, we're going to go ahead and create one
5:35PM WRN Skipping file hashes. This will increase the speed of the inventory, but will not be able to verify the integrity of the files.
5:35PM INF walking directory dir=/Users/drews/Desktop/example-suitcase/
5:35PM INF Finished walking directory files=10
5:35PM INF index is full, adding new index numCases=1 path=/Users/drews/Desktop/example-suitcase/20220221_100626.jpeg size=225122
5:35PM INF Now that we have the inventory, sub in the real suitcase names
5:35PM INF Memory Usage in MB allocated=725352 allocated-percent=100 gc-count=0 system=8735760 total-allocated=725352
5:35PM INF Created inventory file file=/tmp/inventory.yaml
5:35PM INF Individual Suitcase Data file-count=8 file-size=3386722 file-size-human="3.4 MB" index=1
5:35PM INF Individual Suitcase Data file-count=2 file-size=225990 file-size-human="226 kB" index=2
5:35PM INF Total Suitcase Data file-count=10 file-size=3612712 file-size-human="3.6 MB"
5:35PM INF Cloned GPG keys from Git subdir=linux url=https://gitlab.oit.duke.edu/oit-ssi-systems/staff-public-keys.git
5:35PM INF Filling suitcase destination=/tmp/suitcase-foo-02-of-02.tar.gpg encryptInner=false format=tar.gpg index=2
5:35PM INF Filling suitcase destination=/tmp/suitcase-foo-01-of-02.tar.gpg encryptInner=false format=tar.gpg index=1
5:35PM INF Created file file=/tmp/suitcase-foo-02-of-02.tar.gpg
5:35PM INF Created file file=/tmp/suitcase-foo-01-of-02.tar.gpg
5:35PM INF Created CLI meta file meta-file=/tmp/cli-invocation-meta.yaml
5:35PM INF Completed end="2022-07-19 13:35:39.077167 -0400 EDT m=+0.473826130" runtime=471.334499ms start="2022-07-19 13:35:38.605818 -0400 EDT m=+0.002491631"

For more information on the available arguments, run suitcasectl create suitcase --help.

Advanced

Custom Suitcase Settings File

Users can include a suitcasectl.[yaml|toml|json] file in the root of their directory which will automatically be used by suitcasectl for certain options. This could be useful for things like ignore patterns or other settings.

Example:

ignore-glob:
  - "*.out"
  - "*.swp"

Under the covers, the viper library is doing this. Their documentation will be useful when tracking down issues.

Inventory Schema

We will try to keep the inventory as standardized as possible, with that said, we are tracking schema changes inside of pkg/static/schemas. These files represent the schema at a given time. This can be generated using a hidden subcommand: suitcasectl schema > pkg/static/schemas/YYYY-MM-DD.json

CLI Completion

If you are using either our homebrew or deb/rpm packages, command line completion is enabled by default. If you aren't using one of these packages, you can enable completion using suitcasectl completion .... See suitcasectl completion $YOUR_SHELL -h for help on your specific shell.