A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity (and pleasure) to mess around with File Conveyor. File Conveyor is the bachelor's thesis project by well know Drupal contributor Wim Leers. It can do a lot of different things, so it's a bit hard to summarize, but essentially:
- It monitors a directory (remote or local) for new or changed files.
- It sends those files through various processesors which may rename, resize, or otherwise act on the file.
- It then sends the finished files to various destinations which could be local, s3, ftp, and many others.
The primary motivation for the project was to be able to feed Content Delivery Networks (CDN) with files from your site and resize images, compress Javascript, etc on the way. You can see the docs about Drupal integration in the CDN project. The code is written in Python and makes use of several other open source libraries, in particular Django Storages (does not require Django) While File conveyor supports a lot of storage types (s3, ftp, etc) through Storages, there was no way to send files via SFTP. One of Acquia's clients urgently needed sftp / ssh support to send files up to Akamai.
Being the resident Python expert at Acquia (which isn't saying much), I volunteered to help out. The code was fun to write, and it seems to work well, despite being a bit rough in terms of missing tests, etc. If you need SFTP support for Django storages or for FileConveyor, check out my my fork.
