Solid REST

treat any storage backend as a minimal Solid server

This package provides Solid access to local file systems and other storage spaces. It recieves standard Solid REST requests and returns the same kind of response a Solid server sends. This means that libraries and apps can make a file:// or app:// request in the same way they make an https request without having to know anything about the backend and without needing a server on the backend.

Using with rdflib

Solid-Rest is included automatically in rdflib when a script is run outside a browser. This means that commands such as fetcher.load('file:///somepath/container/') will behave, for most purposes just like the same command against an https URI on a Solid server (in this case, create an in-memory parsed version of the container's turtle representation).

Using with other libraries

Solid-Rest can be used with any other libraries capable of operating either outside a browser or in an express-wrapped browser. For example, solid-file-client uses solid-rest behind the scenes to support file transfers between local file systems and remote pods.

Backends

file:// - the local file system; works on command-line or in a browser within an electron process

app://ls/ - an in-memory local storage; works on command-line or in a browser within an electron process

app://bfs/ - any of the dozen or so storage mechanisms supported by BrowserFS - Dropbox, browser Local Storage, browser indexedDB, browser Native File Api, and more; works in a browser.

The file and in-memory storage are initialized automatically with the creation of the rest object. The BrowserFS backends need to be initialized explicitly. Please see tests/browser-test.html in the distribution for an example and details.

Plugins

The package supports plugins, so new backends may be added by supplying the storage system specific commands without having to reinvent the wheel of receiving REST requests and responding to them in a Solid manner. The src/localStorage.js package contains documentation on writing plugins. Contact me for more info.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Otto-AA and CxRes for advice and patches.

copyright © 2019, 2020, Jeff Zucker, may be freely distributed with the MIT license