Listing containers and objects

The swift client tool allows you to easily list containers and objects within your OpenStack Object Storage account.

Getting ready

Ensure you are logged in to a Ubuntu host that has access to our OpenStack environment on the 192.168.100.0/24 public network. This host will be used to run client tools against the OpenStack environment created. If you are using the accompanying Vagrant environment, as described in the Preface, you can use the controller node. It has the python-swiftclient package that provides the swift command-line client.

If you created this node with Vagrant, you can execute the following command:

vagrant ssh controller

Ensure you have set the following credentials (adjust the path to your certificates and key file to match your environment if not using the Vagrant environment):

export OS_TENANT_NAME=cookbook
export OS_USERNAME=admin
export OS_PASSWORD=openstack
export OS_AUTH_URL=https://192.168.100.200:5000/v2.0/
export OS_NO_CACHE=1
export OS_KEY=/vagrant/cakey.pem
export OS_CACERT=/vagrant/ca.pem

How to do it...

Carry out the following to list objects within our OpenStack Object Storage environment.

Listing all objects in a container

Let's list all the objects in a container:

  1. In the preceding recipes, we uploaded a small number of files. To simply list the objects within our test container, we issue the following command:
    swift list test

    The preceding command will give you an output like this:

    Listing all objects in a container

Listing specific object paths in a container

Let's list all the specific object paths in a container:

  1. To list just the files within the tmp/test path, we specify this with the -p parameter:
    swift list -p tmp/test test

    The preceding command will list our two files:

    tmp/test/test1
tmp/test/test2
  2. We can put partial matches in the -p parameter too. For example, we issue the following command to list all files starting with tmp/ex:
    swift list -p tmp/ex test

    The preceding command will list files that match the string we specified:

    tmp/example-500Mb

How it works...

The swift tool is a basic but versatile utility that allows us to do many of the things we want to do with files. Listing them in a way that suits the user is also possible. To simply list the contents of our container, use the following syntax:

swift list {container_name}

To list a file in a particular path within the container, we add in the -p parameter to the syntax:

swift list -p path {container_name}
..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset