Over the last few months, Tim Head has been pushing forward the osfclient project, an effort to build a simple and friendly command-line interface to the Open Science Framework's file storage. This project was funded by a gift to my lab through the Center for Open Science (COS) to the tune of about $20k, given by an anonymous donor.

The original project was actually to write an OSF integration for Galaxy, but that project was first delayed by my move to UC Davis and then suffered from Michael Crusoe's move to work on the Common Workflow Language. After talking with the COS folk, we decided to repurpose the money to something that addresses a need in my lab - using the Open Science Framework to share files.

Our (Tim's) integration effort resulted in osfclient, a combination Python API and command-line program. The project is still in its early stages, but a few people have found it useful - in addition to increasing usage within my lab, @zkamvar has used it to transfer "tens of thousands of files", and @danudwary found it "just worked" for grabbing some big files. And new detailed use cases are emerging regularly.

Most exciting of all, we've had contributions from a number of other people already, and I'm looking forward to this project growing to meet the needs of the open science community!

Taking a step back: why OSF, and why a command-line client?

I talked a bit about "why OSF?" in a previous blog post, but the short version is that it's a globally accessible place to store files for science, and it works well for that! It fits a niche that we haven't found any other solutions for - free storage for medium size genomics files - and we're actively exploring its use in about a dozen different projects.

Our underlying motivations for building a command-line client for OSF were several:

• we often need to retrieve full folder/directory hierarchies of files for research and training purposes;

• frequently, we want to retrieve those file hierarchies on remote (cloud or HPC) systems;

• we're often grabbing files that are larger than GitHub supports;

• sometimes these files are from private projects that we cannot (or don't want to) publicize;

Here, the Open Science Framework was already an 80% solution (supporting folder hierarchies, large file storage, and a robust permissions system), but it didn't have a command-line client - we were reduced to using curl or wget on individual files, or (in theory) writing our own REST queries.

Enter osfclient!

Using osfclient, a quickstart

(See "Troubleshooting osfclient installs" at the bottom if you run into any troubles running these commands!)

In a Python 3 environment, do:

pip install osfclient

and then execute:

osf -p fuqsk clone

This will go to the osfclient test project on http://osf.io, and download all the files that are part of that project -- if you execute:

find fuqsk

you should see:

fuqsk
fuqsk/figshare
fuqsk/figshare/this is a test text file
fuqsk/figshare/this is a test text file/hello.txt
fuqsk/googledrive
fuqsk/googledrive/google test file.gdoc
fuqsk/googledrive/googledrive-hello.txt
fuqsk/osfstorage
fuqsk/osfstorage/hello.txt
fuqsk/osfstorage/test-subfolder
fuqsk/osfstorage/test-subfolder/hello-from-subfolder.txt

which showcases a particularly nice feature of the OSF that I'll talk about below.

A basic overview of what osfclient did

If you go to the project URL, http://osf.io/fuqsk, you will see a file storage hierarchy that looks like so:

What osfclient is doing is grabbing all of the different storage files and downloading them to your local machine. Et voila!

What's with the 'figshare' and 'googledrive' stuff? Introducing add-ons/integrations.

In the above, you'll notice that there are these subdirectories named figshare and googledrive. What are those?

The Open Science Framework can act as an umbrella integration for a variety of external storage services - see the docs. They support Amazon S3, Dropbox, Google Drive, Figshare, and a bunch of others.

In the above project, I linked in my Google Drive and Figshare accounts to OSF, and connected specific remote folders/projects into the OSF project (this one from Google Drive, and this one from figshare). This allows me (and others with permissions on the project) to access and manage those files from within a single Web UI on the OSF.

osfclient understands some of these integrations (and it's pretty trivial to add a new one to the client, at least), and it does the most obvious thing possible with them when you do a osfclient clone: it grabs the files and downloads them! (It should also be able to push to those remote storages, but I haven't tested that today.)

Interestingly, this appears to be a good simple way to layer OSF's project hierarchy and permission system on top of more complex and/or less flexible and/or non-command-line-friendly systems. For example, Luiz Irber recently uploaded a very large file to google drive via rclone and it showed up in his OSF project just fine.

This reasonably flexible imposition of an overall namespace on a disparate collection of storages is pretty nice, and could be a real benefit for large, complex projects.

Other things you can do with osfclient

osfclient also has file listing and file upload functionality, along with some configurability in terms of providing a default project and permissions within specific directories. The osfclient User Guide has some brief instructions along these lines.

osfclient also contains a Python API for OSF, and you can see a bit more about that here, in Tim Head and Erin Braswell's webinar materials.

What's next?

There are a few inconveniences about the OSF that could usefully be worked around, and a lot of features to be added in osfclient. In no particular order, here are a few of the big ones that require significant refactoring or design decisions or even new REST API functionality on the OSF side --

• we want to make osf behave a bit more like git - see the issue. This would make it easier to teach and use, we think. In particular we want to avoid having to specify the project name every time.
• speaking of project names, I don't think the project UIDs on the OSF (fuqsk above) are particular intuitive or type-able, and it would be great to have a command line way of discovering the project UID for your project of interest.
• I'd also like to add project creation and maybe removal via the command line, as well as project registration - more on that later.
• the file storage hierarchy above, with osfstorage/ and figshare/ as top level directories, isn't wonderful for command line folk - there are seemingly needless hierarchies in there. I'm not sure how to deal with this but there are a couple of possible solutions, including adding a per-project 'remapping' configuration that would move the files around.

Concluding thoughts

The OSF offers a simple, free, Web friendly, and convenient way to privately and publicly store collections of files under 5 GB in size on a Web site. osfclient provides a simple and reasonably functional way to download files from and upload files to the OSF via the command line. Give it a try!

Appendix: Troubleshooting osfclient installs

1. If you can't run pip install on your system, you may need to either run the command as root, OR establish a virtual environment -- something like

python -m virtualenv -p python3.5 osftest . osftest/bin/activate pip install osfclient

will create a virtualenv, activate it, and install osfclient. (If you run into problems)

1. If you get a requests.exceptions.SSLError, you may be on a Mac and using an old version of openssl. You can try pip install -U pyopenssl. If that doesn't work, please add a comment to this issue.

2. Note that a conda install for osfclient exists, and you should be able to do conda install -c conda-forge osfclient.