Girder

1. What is Girder

Girder is a data management platform. It can be used to store (large) files such as meshes, simulation results, etc…​ Read more about it in the Feel++ data manual or on the official website.

2. File access options

A big advantage of girder is that files can be accessed either with a nice user interface (in a web browser) or more programmatically (via CLI or programming interfaces). This is true for both upload and download.

2.1. Web browser UI

If you are new to Girder, you should start with the web user interface to discover the service. You are encouraged to read the documentation documentation and especially the user guide. For example, using a web browser, you can reach our server.

Web user interface
This is quite straightforward and it should illustrate important concepts and help better visualize the following section.

2.2. Python API

To download or upload a file using python, we have two options. We can either use a login system (user + password) or an API key. - With the user/password, we will need to provide a user and a password to access files, just like a human would do using the UI. - With an API key, the script only needs an API key. This means we do not need to have an account on the Girder server.

In both cases, similar pieces of information are required:

  • an address (URL): to reach the server,

  • a file ID: to tell which file/directory we want to manipulate,

  • either a user/password pair or an API key: to grant access to the required file(s).

Let’s check out some scripts.