Pulp

Problem¶

Lazy sync requires the plugin to create *Content, ContentArtifacts, and RemoteArtifact objects for every piece of content discovered at the remote. This kind of indexing is resource utilization prohibitive for repositories with millions of artifacts.

Solution¶

Data model change¶

Make content indexing optional by enabling users to configure a Distribution with a Remote. This would be a new relation field added to "Distribution" and called "'remote'".

Integration with the Content serving app and Streamer¶

The content app would then do the following to find an artifact to serve to the user:

1. Match path to a distribution.
2. Try to find an artifact by looking at the Publication associated with the Distribution.
3. If an Artifact is found, send the content of it as a response.
4. If an Artifact is not found and a RemoteArtifact is found, fetch the artifact using the 'remote' and stream the response back to the user.
5. If remote's policy is 'on_demand' or 'immediate', create an Artifact.
6. If neither an Artifact nor a RemoteArtifact is found, check if there is a 'remote' associated with the Distribution.
7. If a 'remote' is not set for the Distribution, return a 404.
8. If a 'remote' is associated, fetch the artifact using the 'remote' and stream the response back to the user.
9. Create a RemoteArtifact.
10. If remote's policy is 'on_demand' or 'immediate', create an Artifact.

Example use case with Maven¶

Maven central hosts millions of Maven Artifacts. It's hosted at https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/. The user will take the following steps to create pass-through cache of Maven Central in Pulp.

1. Create a Maven Remote that points to "https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/".
2. Create a Distribution that has ''remote'' set to the remote created in step 1 and relative path set to 'foo'.

When mvn is building a project and requests an artifact from Pulp at "http://hostname/pulp/content/foo/com/google/code/findbugs/jsr305/1.3.9/jsr305-1.3.9.jar", the Content app is going to ask the streamer to fetch the artifact from "https://repo1.maven.org/maven2/com/google/code/findbugs/jsr305/1.3.9/jsr305-1.3.9.jar" and then create an Artifact and a RemoteArtifact for this artifact. The next time the Content app should be able to locate the Artifact via the remote artifact's URL.