CODEWITHSUNDEEP
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ayman adam
ayman adam

Reputation: 31

How the GitHub store your repository files?

I'm feeling stupid, but I want to know how GitHub and Dropbox store user files, because I have a similar problem and I need to store user's project files .

Is it just like storing project files somewhere in the server and refer to the location as a field in the database, or there are other better methods ?

Thanks.

Upvotes: 3

Views: 335

Answers (1)

Tom Morris
Tom Morris

Reputation: 3999

GitHub uses Git to store repositories, and accesses those repos from their Ruby application. They used to do this with Grit, a Ruby library. Grit was written to implement Git in Ruby but has been replaced with rugged. There are Git reimplementations in other languages like JGit for Java and Dulwich for Python. This presentation gives some details about how GitHub has changed over the years and is worth watching/browsing the slides.

If you wanted to store Git repositories, what you'd want to do is store them on a filesystem (or a cluster thereof) and then have a pointer in your database to point to where the filesystem is located, then use a library like Rugged or JGit or Dulwich to read stuff from the Git repository.

Dropbox stores files on Amazon's S3 service and then implements some wrappers around that for security and so on. This paper describes the protocol that Dropbox uses.

The actual question you've asked is how do you store user files. The simple answer is... on the filesystem. There are plugins for a lot of popular web frameworks for doing user file uploads and file management. Django has Django-Filer for instance. The difficulty you'll encounter in rolling your own file upload management system is building a sensible way to do permissions (so users can only download the files they are entitled to download), so it is worth looking into how the various framework plugins do it.

Upvotes: 1

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