Geddit

Simple zero-configuration retrieval of resources by URL.

This module provides a single geddit function which takes a single parameter specifying the URL to fetch. It will return a bytes object with the contents of the resource at that URL or will raise an exception specific to the URL scheme.

This library is intended to be used in situations where scheme-specific configuration can be inferred from the environment. (For example, in Google Cloud-hosted environments there is usually a default identity which the services run as. This identity will be used to fetch resources specified via the gs or sm schemes.)

This library is not intended to replace general use libraries such as requests.

Examples

from geddit import geddit

# The default scheme is file://
geddit('file:///etc/issue')     # == b'Debian GNU/Linux 10 \\n \\l\n\n'
geddit('/etc/issue')            # == b'Debian GNU/Linux 10 \\n \\l\n\n'
geddit('./README.md')           # Raises: ValueError

# Fetching using HTTP over TLS
geddit('https://www.gov.uk/bank-holidays.json')[:20]  # == b'{"england-and-wales"'

# HTTP errors are reported
geddit('https://www.example.com/not-found')  # raises requests.exceptions.HTTPError

# Google Storage objects. Uses default application credentials.
geddit('gs://my-bucket/some-object')

# Google Secret Manager secrets. Uses default application credentials.
geddit('sm://my-project/some-secret')       # fetches latest version
geddit('sm://my-project/some-secret#3')     # fetches version 3

# Data URLs.
geddit('data:application/x-yaml;charset=utf-8;base64,eyJmb28iOjF9')  # == b'{"foo":1}'

Requirements

• Python >= 3.8.

Installation

The latest release of this library on PyPI can be installed using pip:

$ pip3 install geddit

The library can also be installed directly from the git repository if you want the most up-to-date version.

$ pip3 install git+https://gitlab.developers.cam.ac.uk/uis/devops/lib/geddit.git

For developers, the tool can be installed from a cloned repo using pip:

$ cd /path/to/this/repo
$ pip3 install -e .

Publishing a new release

See the guidebook section on publishing to PyPI for more information.

License

This software is licensed under an MIT-like software license. See the LICENSE file for the full text of the license.

Scheme-specific notes

file

The file scheme is the default scheme. Only absolute paths can be specified.

https

There is no support for HTTP basic authentication as that involves putting the cleartext password into the URL.

Non-TLS ("http") URLs are not supported.

gs and sm

Only default application credentials are supported. To use specific credentials, set the GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS environment variable to the absolute path to some JSON-formatted credentials.

data

Data URLs are not good way of passing secrets since their values are transparent. They can be useful for transferring non-secret configuration or for use in development environments.