Simple dav blob store for bosh

There are times when you want to share a bosh release but you really don't want to deal with the expense of setting up an s3 or swift blob store up on the internet. What you really want is a very simple blob store that provides basic read access to a small community of users and authenticated write access for yourself.

Okay - even if you don't have that problem, I did. And when I did have the problem, I didn't want to deal with setting up the ruby "simple" blob store with SSL and I discovered that the bosh cli doesn't actually work with compliant WebDAV servers so, here we are.

Building the server

Simply use go get to get the server and install it to ${GOPATH}/bin:

go get github.com/sykesm/dav-blobstore

Configuring the server

In order to use the server, you need to create a JSON configuration file and point the server to it.

{
    "blobs_path": "/path/to/blobs/root",
    "public_read": true,
    "cert_file": "/path/to/ssl/certificate",
    "key_file": "/path/to/server/key",
    "users": {
        "user": "password"
    }
}

blobs_path is the only required field and it points to the root directory of the blob store.

public_read indicates whether or not GET and HEAD requests require authentication. If omitted or false, you will want to define authorized users in the users field.

cert_file and key_file are used to enable TLS. When both of these fields are set, the server will only support https. Enabling TLS is recommended.

users is a map of key value pairs representing authorized users and their passwords. Basic authentication is always used for operations other than GET and HEAD -- regardless of the value of public_read.

Running the server

Once the configuration file is ready, you simply launch the server with the -configFile flag. If you wish to control which address the server listens on, you can set -listenAddress.

${GOPATH}/bin/dav-blobstore -listenAddress :14000 -configFile /user/local/etc/config.json

Configuring bosh

In your bosh release, you'll need to point to your blob store in config/final.yaml. You'll likely need to set ssl_no_verify since, as a simple server, you're probably using a self-signed certificate...

---
final_name: my-release
blobstore:
  provider: dav
  options:
    endpoint: https://blobs.example.com:14000
    ssl_no_verify: true

For those that need to upload blobs to the store, you'll also need to generate a config/private.yml that contains credentials for the store.

---
blobstore:
  dav:
    user: user
    password: password