Fluidinfo (formerly FluidDB) is a shared online datastore based on tags with values. It allows anyone to store, organize, query and share data about anything.

Our developer page is a good starting point on how to use Fluidinfo, and the API documentation is included in the doc/ directory.

For more information we recommend our book, Getting Started with Fluidinfo — or have a look at the blog.

Deployment is automated by commands provided by the bin/fluidinfo tool. Please run the following commands to learn more about it:

$ bin/fluidinfo help commands
$ bin/fluidinfo help deployment

You can learn more about deployment by reading DEPLOYMENT.rst.

Fluidinfo uses configuration files to determine which database and index to use, which port to run on, etc.

Deployment configuration files are stored in directories under the deployment directory.

The default configuration file (in deployment/default/fluidinfo/fluidinfo-api.conf.template) looks something like this:

[service]
temp-path = var/tmp
max-threads = 4
port = 9000

[store]
main-uri = postgres://fluidinfo:fluidinfo@localhost/fluidinfo-test

[index]
url = http://localhost:8080/solr
shard = localhost:8080/solr

[cache]
host = 127.0.0.1
port = 6379
db = 0

[oauth]
access-secret =
renewal-secret =
renewal-token-duration = 168

See the docstring for fluiddb.application.setupConfig for information about these and additional fields.

The API service is a stateless HTTP server that provides the public API to Fluidinfo. It can be run using a variety of topologies from single instance deployments to many instance deployments.

The service is started with the fluidinfo-api command:

$ bin/fluidinfo-api -n

This will start an API service running interactively on port 9000 and configured with a default configuration. When many API services are run they must each listen on a unique port. Port numbers can be explicitly specified as the command-line option to override the default value:

$ bin/fluidinfo-api -n --port 9001

This starts the API service with the default configuration on port 9001.

bin/fluidinfo-api runs with a default configuration unless a --config command line option is passed:

$ bin/fluidinfo-api --config /etc/fluidinfo/main.conf

If the path is relative the current working directory is used as the base. See the docstring for fluiddb.application.setupConfig to learn more about configuration file parameters.

By default, OAuth2 interactions require HTTPS requests and will fail if a plain HTTP request is made. You can pass an optional --development flag which disables HTTPS checks for OAuth2 interactions to perform local testing and debugging:

$ bin/fluidinfo-api -n --development

Fluidinfo requires Python 2.6+ and is designed, tested and hosted on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Please install virtualenvwrapper to manage Python virtual environments. See http://www.doughellmann.com/projects/virtualenvwrapper

Having said that, the following instructions should work on the latest stable Ubuntu release.

Your first step should be to visit https://github.com/fluidinfo/fluidinfo and create a fork of the fluiddb project. Then:

$ mkvirtualenv fluiddb
$ cd YOUR-TOP-LEVEL-PROJECTS-DIR
$ git clone git@github.com:YOUR-GITHUB-USERNAME/fluiddb.git
$ cd fluiddb
$ git remote add upstream git@github.com:fluidinfo/fluiddb.git

Note that internally we often still refer to the Fluidinfo source code as "fluiddb". This helps to distinguish it from the company name and from the "fluidinfo.com" web application.

Run the following command from the project root to get the dependencies:

$ bin/check-dependencies

If you get complaints about GNU parallel make sure the following is in your apt sources file (/etc/apt/sources.list.d):

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/ieltonf/ppa/ubuntu oneiric main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/ieltonf/ppa/ubuntu oneiric main

Finally, ensure that the PPA for Fluidinfo referenced in the same file is pointing to lucid:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fluidinfo/fluiddb/ubuntu lucid main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/fluidinfo/fluiddb/ubuntu lucid main

Where possible, Fluidinfo uses package dependencies installed from Ubuntu repositories. In some cases, we rely on source dependencies, which are installed by pip in a virtualenv. Continuing from above:

$ make build

If you ever need to rebuild the dependencies, you can re-run make build.

Fluidinfo uses a PostgreSQL database to store information about users, namespaces, tags and so on. You'll need to create a database user for Fluidinfo:

$ make setup-postgres

Note: If you are using PostgreSQL 9.1, you should change the bytea_output setting to escape in the file /etc/postgresql/9.1/main/postgresql.conf.

All tests should pass:

$ make check-all

make check-all starts Fluidinfo and runs all unit and integration tests. You can also run make check or make check-integration to run just the unit tests or just the integration tests.

Now that you have all the moving parts in place, go and read the docstring in fluiddb.__init__. It provides a high-level overview of the system design.

Copyright 2007-2016 Fluidinfo, Inc.

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
You may obtain a copy of the License at

    http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.