The web can be used as a special remote too.
# git annex addurl http://example.com/video.mpeg
addurl example.com_video.mpeg (downloading http://example.com/video.mpeg)
########################################################## 100.0%
ok
Now the file is downloaded, and has been added to the annex like any other file. So it can be renamed, copied to other repositories, and so on.
To add a lot of urls at once, just list them all as parameters to
git annex addurl
.
trust issues
Note that git-annex assumes that, if the web site does not 404, and has the right file size, the file is still present on the web, and this counts as one copy of the file. If the file still seems to be present on the web, it will let you remove your last copy, trusting it can be downloaded again:
# git annex drop example.com_video.mpeg
drop example.com_video.mpeg (checking http://example.com/video.mpeg) ok
If you don't trust the web to this degree, just let git-annex know:
# git annex untrust web
untrust web ok
With the result that it will hang onto files:
# git annex drop example.com_video.mpeg
drop example.com_video.mpeg (unsafe)
Could only verify the existence of 0 out of 1 necessary copies
Also these untrusted repositories may contain the file:
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001 -- web
(Use --force to override this check, or adjust annex.numcopies.)
failed
attaching urls to existing files
You can also attach urls to any file already in the annex:
# git annex addurl --file my_cool_big_file http://example.com/cool_big_file
addurl my_cool_big_file ok
# git annex whereis my_cool_big_file
whereis my_cool_big_file (2 copies)
00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000001 -- web
27a9510c-760a-11e1-b9a0-c731d2b77df9 -- here
configuring filenames
By default, addurl
will generate a filename for you. You can use
--file=
to specify the filename to use.
If you're adding a bunch of related files to a directory, or just don't
like the default filenames generated by addurl
, you can use --pathdepth
to specify how many parts of the url are put in the filename.
A positive number drops that many paths from the beginning, while a negative
number takes that many paths from the end.
# git annex addurl http://example.com/videos/2012/01/video.mpeg
addurl example.com_videos_2012_01_video.mpeg (downloading http://example.com/videos/2012/01/video.mpeg)
# git annex addurl http://example.com/videos/2012/01/video.mpeg --pathdepth=2
addurl 2012_01_video.mpeg (downloading http://example.com/videos/2012/01/video.mpeg)
# git annex addurl http://example.com/videos/2012/01/video.mpeg --pathdepth=-2
addurl 01_video.mpeg (downloading http://example.com/videos/2012/01/video.mpeg)
videos
There's support for downloading videos from sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and many more. This relies on quvi to find urls to the actual videos files.
When you have quvi installed, you can just
git annex addurl http://youtube.com/foo
and it will detect that
it is a video and download the video content for offline viewing.
Later, in another clone of the repository, you can run git annex get
on
the file and it will also be downloaded with the help of quvi. This works
even if the video host has transcoded or otherwise changed the video
in the meantime; the assumption is that these video files are equivilant.
There is an annex.quvi-options
configuration setting that can be used
to pass parameters to quvi. For example, you could set git config
annex.quvi-options "--format low"
to configure it to download low
quality videos from YouTube.
Note that for performance reasons, the url is not checked for redirects, so some shortened urls will not be detected. You can either load the short url in a browser to get the full url, or you can force use of quvi with redirect detection, by prepending "quvi:" to the url.
Downloading whole YouTube playlists is not currently supported by quvi.
podcasts
This is done using git annex importfeed
. See downloading podcasts.
There are resources that I want to add to my annex that are currently available via a URL, but it seems like if I add these using
git-annex addurl
, they get symlinked to file in the annex/objects directory that starts withURL-...
, instead of the more typicalSHA256-...
, and this does not change even after the files are downloaded.My concern is that I really want to ensure that these files don't change, which is the appeal of content-addressable symlinking of normal files (as opposed to URL addressable ones).
Would there be a way to automate the injection of hash-based symlinking for files that are added via addurl? Sometimes I add a bunch of files via
addurl --fast
, and after I've download them viaget
, it would be nice to have those files have the same level of data integrity as when I download them using something outside of git-annex, add them to the annex, and do anaddurl --file
afterward.Thanks for all of your hard work!
addurl
only uses the URL- keys if you run it with --fast. Otherwise it downloads the content and hashes it the same asadd
does.If you use
--fast
, you can go back andgit annex migrate
the file once it's been downloaded, to convert it to the SHA backend.is there a way to remove one of the urls? e.g. if I have
and would like to remove the fail2ban.org one... ?
You can use
git annex rmurl $file $url
, which I just added to git-annex.(Also,
git annex drop $file --from web
will remove all the urls..)