Eyebrowse

A prototype S3 bucket file browser.

Eyebrowse reads the contents of an S3 bucket, caches the file list locally in mongodb, and provides a simple UI for browsing and downloading the files.

Prerequisites

Nodejs and Mongodb.

Launching

Start the server.

npm install

# for production
npm start

# for development
npm run dev

Build and launch the client.

cd client
npm install
npm start

Configuration

The Eyebrowse server is configured with environment variables and the client is configured with a config.json file.

Configuring the server

Eyebrowse is configured with the following environment variables.

• EYEBROWSE_COOKIE_SECRET - A long, random string used for generating user session cookies. Allows sessions to persist between restarts of Eyebrowse. Generate a value with openssl rand -hex 32 and read more in Keystone's docs.

• EYEBROWSE_S3_REGION - The S3 region. Default: none.

• EYEBROWSE_S3_BUCKET_NAME - The name of your bucket. Default none.

• EYEBROWSE_S3_ACCESS_KEY - Your access key. Default none.

• EYEBROWSE_S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY - Your secret access key. Default none.

• EYEBROWSE_MONGO_HOST - The hostname of your mongodb instance. Default "localhost"

• EYEBROWSE_MONGO_PORT - The port of your mongodb instance. Default 27017

• EYEBROWSE_MONGO_DATABASE - The database to use. Default: "eyebrowse"

• EYEBROWSE_MONGO_USER - The mongodb user. Default: none.

• EYEBROWSE_MONGO_PASSWORD - The user's password to use. Default: none.

• EYEBROWSE_DISPLAY_HIDDEN - Whether or not to display files whose names begin with ., such as .htaccess. Enable with EYEBROWSE_DISPLAY_HIDDEN=true, all other values are considered false. Default: false.

These environment variables can be set as normal, or placed into a .env file at the root of the project. The latter is a better option for local development than production.

Configuring the client

The client has a single configuration option, api_url, which is the URL to the Eyebrowse API.

Default config.json

{
    "api_url": "http://localhost:3000"
}

If the API and client are being served under the same hostname, a host-relative api_url can be used, such as:

    "api_url": "/"

To improve performance, you can avoid the round-trip fetch of config.json by embedding the configuration within index.html.

Symlinking

S3 doesn't have a concept of linking, so Eyebrowse simulates symlinks with the following scheme. If you wish to have a symlink named latest that links to the latest version artifact directory build/artifacts/v2.0.0,

Filename: link__latest

build/artifacts/v2.0.0

The link__ name prefix indicates to Eyebrowse that this file is intended to be a symlink. The file contains the path to the link target.

Here's more clarification about the link behavior.

• Link filename must begin with link__
• Link must be a text file
• The first line of the text file must be the path to the desired link target
• The link target may be a file or a directory
• The path must be absolute (or if you prefer, relative to the root of the bucket)
• The path must not begin with a slash