see also wiki:NewbieDeveloperSetup, wiki:Manual, and wiki:Doc

Dev

Views into the process of Tahoe-LAFS hackery.

• The Roadmap page (linked at the top of each page) shows the next planned release and what improvements and bugfixes we are working on.
• The User Doc page
• The Buildbot page

Source Code (via revision control)

• ​git checkout:

git clone https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs.git

• If you have been given permission to commit directly to trunk, also do:

git remote set-url --push origin git@github.com:tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs.git

Community

• The tahoe-dev mailing list is the community forum for discussion of Tahoe-LAFS design, implementation, and usage.
• Tahoe-LAFS hackers chat on ​irc.freenode.net in channel #tahoe-lafs. This channel is archived at ​http://fred.submusic.ch/irc/tahoe-lafs/ .
• The CREDITS file​ contains names people who have contributed to the Tahoe-LAFS project.
• The RelatedProjects page has extensions to Tahoe-LAFS and integrations of Tahoe-LAFS with other open source software.
• There is a weekly conference call for core developers or interested community members.

Extensions

• Tahoe-LAFS has a programmatic API which enables building custom applications on top of the storage infrastructure.
• The docs/frontends/webapi.rst​ document shows how to control a Tahoe-LAFS node programmatically over HTTP.
• The Extension Page has some additional tips on how to use the web-API.

Developer Docs

Design of the System

• ​TahoeLAFSBasics on the Nilestore Project's site. This document was written by someone from another project who hasn't really interacted with the Tahoe-LAFS developers much, but it is the best overall introduction to the design of Tahoe-LAFS.
• after that, look at the "Presentations / Papers", below, or at the "architecture.rst" file in the docs/ directory.
• Other resources for understanding Tahoe's code:
  • ​Where does allmydata.client start listening?

Presentations / Papers

• slides presented at “Vail Computing Elements Workshop” in Vail 2013
• slides presented at “ECRYPT II Crypto For 2020” in Tenerife 2013
• trac/tahoe-lafs/attachment/wiki/News/tahoe-RSA-slides.pdf presented at RSA 2010
• Tahoe – The Least-Authority Filesystem presented at ​Storage Security and Survivability '08
• Tahoe: A Secure Distributed Filesystem presented at ​PyCon2008, providing an overview of the Tahoe-LAFS design, and the slides (.zip) that were used for the presentation
• ​A Performance Evaluation and Examination of Open-Source Erasure Coding Libraries For Storage to be presented at ​FAST-2009: 7th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies

How To Contribute To The Tahoe-LAFS Project

• how to review patches <-- You can help!
• how to submit patches
• coding standards
• how to write tests
• how to report a bug
• Debugging:
  • Debugging tips in tahoe-dev mailing list:
    • ​https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-April/008165.html
    • ​https://tahoe-lafs.org/pipermail/tahoe-dev/2013-July/008579.html
  • The ​logging system
  • How to differentiate your running nodes' versions? See comments: ticket:2131#comment:8

Cool New Ideas We're Working On

• Ostrom is about how social networking and economics interact with distributed storage
• OneHundredYearCryptography

More Details To Look Up While Working On Your Contribution

• the docs/ directory <-- most core doc is in the source tree here
• Capabilities: what are readcaps and writecaps and verifycaps, etc
• The Packaging page shows our current policy for how to re-use 3rd-party libraries and how to distribute Tahoe-LAFS to users.

Tools

• tahoe-lafs-trac-stream mailing list is the way to receive lots of emails from trac
• Sources for Tahoe-LAFS and its side-projects are browsable via the "Browse Source" button at the top of each project site
• https://source/tahoe-lafs/tarballs contains snapshots of current source code.
• The Buildbot page (linked at the top of each page) shows current build and test results. See the BuildbotPolicy page and HowtoContributeABuildbot page.
• The Timeline (linked at the top of each page) shows changes to the source code, the issue tickets, and the wiki (i.e. this web site).

Dependencies

• Copies of libraries that Tahoe-LAFS is dependent on are at source/tahoe-lafs/deps/.
• The tahoe-dep-eggs subdirectory has precompiled "egg" packages (scroll to the bottom for a matrix of platforms and Python versions for each package).

Metrics

• The Performance page has notes and graphs about performance measurements.
• The TestGrid page contains usage statistics about the public test grid.

See Also

• The News page for sources of news and information.
• The Bibliography page contains links to scientific papers of interest.
• The RelatedProjects page contains links to a few other decentralized storage projects that you might be interested in.
• The ResearchVenues page contains a list of conferences and other venues where Tahoe-LAFS is a potential topic of interest.
• TahoeVsDebianBuggyOpenSsl for details about Tahoe-LAFS's mild vulnerability to the May 2008 Debian OpenSSL problems.
• Google Summer of Code Ideas

Papers By Others About Tahoe-LAFS or Derivatives

• ​Cloud Storage Vault—Master's Thesis by Haver, Melvold, Ruud
• Experimenting with SHA-3 candidates in Tahoe-LAFS by Haver, Ruud