Cloud User Shell (cush) multi-call executable brings cushy, RESTful cloud control to the command line.

Philosophy

It follows the wildly successful Unix philosophy:

This is the Unix cloud computing philosophy:

1. Write programs components that do one thing and do it well.
2. Write programs components to work together.
3. Write programs components to handle text HTTP streams, because that is a universal interface.

RESTful

It is also RESTful, clearly delineating the 3 sides of the REST Triangle:

• Verbs (constrained) e.g. GET
• Nouns (unconstrained) e.g. URIs (http://samj.net/])
• Content Types (constrained, optional */*) e.g. HTML (text/html)

Installation

To install the python prototype cush.py

• Unix
• Change to a suitable directory (eg /usr/local/bin) and be sure you can write (eg sudo -s)
• If you have Subversion do svn export http://cush.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/python/cush.py so the keyword substitutions work
• Otherwise download http://cush.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/python/cush.py:
• curl -O http://cush.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/python/cush.py or
• wget http://cush.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/python/cush.py
• Make the file executable with chmod 755 cush.py
• cush.py install to create symlinks for the commands
• Windows
• Download http://cush.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/src/python/cush.py (right click, Save As)
• All
• cush.py upgrade periodically to stay up-to-date

Usage

Usage: cush [verb] [noun]
   or: [verb] [noun]
   eg: get http://samj.net

Cloud User SHell (cush) is a multi-call binary (like BusyBox) that combines
many useful cloud computing utilities into a single executable. Most people
will create a link to cush for each function they wish to use and cush will
act like whatever it was invoked as, but it can also be called directly and
passed the command as the first parameter.

Currently defined functions:
	@, @@, delete, get, head, ls, post, propfind, put, rm

Examples

All of these work alongside your favourite shell, eg bash

Send files to/from the cloud and process them as if they were local:

$ echo "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." | put http://local/uploads/brown.txt
$ get http://localhost/uploads/brown.txt
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
$ get http://local/uploads/brown.txt | sed -e 's/brown/red/' | put http://local/uploads/red.txt

Even when they are:

$ get http://local/uploads/red.txt > /tmp/red.txt
$ get file:///tmp/red.txt
The quick red fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Dereference URIs with shorthand syntax (equivalent to GET command):

$ @ http://localhost/uploads/brown.txt
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

Manipulate data in the cloud by listing (ls) and removing (rm) URIs like local files:

$ ls http://localhost/uploads/colours/
brown.txt
red.txt
$ rm http://localhost/uploads/colours/red.txt
$ ls http://localhost/uploads/colours/
brown.txt

Set up HttpPipelines (like Unix pipelines) for data processing:

The following shows an rfc822 email message being pipelined through two URIs for spam filtering (which adds a X-Spam-Flag: YES header if it finds 'Viagra') and a legal notice (which appends 'This message is confidential.').

$ cat rfc822-spam.txt |@ http://localhost/cgi-bin/spam-vapouriser.cgi |@ http://localhost/cgi-bin/legal-notifier.cgi
X-Spam-Flag: YES
Received: by 10.150.96.14 with HTTP; Tue, 5 Aug 2008 04:52:14 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <21606dcf0808050452l74eee336g6bac459463c17f79@mail.gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 13:52:14 +0200
From: "Sam Johnston" <samj@samj.net>
To: "Sam Johnston" <samj@samj.net>
Subject: Cloud Computing User Shell (cush)
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Content-Disposition: inline
Delivered-To: samj@samj.net

Check out Viagra - it rocks.

This message is confidential.

Obtain and manipulate structured data (eg titles of the items in a feed, weather in Sydney):

$ get http://feeds.feedburner.com/samj | xpath //rss/channel/item/title
Found 24 nodes:
-- NODE --
<title>Cloud standards: not so fast...</title>-- NODE --
<title>Cloud computing and Open Source software</title>-- NODE --
...
$ get http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?p=ASXX0112 | xpath /rss/channel/item/yweather:condition
Found 1 nodes:
-- NODE --
<yweather:condition text="Partly Cloudy" code="30" temp="50" date="Wed, 27 Aug 2008 6:30 am AEST" />

Obtain information about URIs and technical debugging:

$ head http://samj.net/
content-length: 0
server: GFE/1.3
last-modified: Mon, 25 Aug 2008 22:04:36 GMT
etag: "55ed4707-7cbc-4208-9cbc-cbc6105bc682"
cache-control: max-age=0 private
date: Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:22:45 GMT
content-type: text/html; charset=UTF-8