Getting started (quickly) with OpenStack’s Swift

10 November 2010 - San Antonio

I was at the OpenStack Design Summit this week and I wanted to check out the latest release of Swift, OpenStack’s blob storage technology. The Swift All In One guide contains everything necessary to get started with Swift on a development machine, but it involves far too much effort for my tastes.

I decided to quickly automate the entire process with a single bash script. So now you can get started with Swift with two commands on a new Ubuntu 10.10 VM

wget http://offbytwo.com/scripts/try-swift-on-ubuntu.sh bash try-swift-on-ubuntu.sh devauth

There is actually a far better way to get Swift up and running in an automated fashion using Chef (and possibly Vagrant), but I’ll leave that for another post.