xpublish

Publish Xarray Datasets via a Zarr compatible REST API

Server side: Publish a xarray dataset as a rest API

ds.rest.serve(host="0.0.0.0", port=9000)

Client side: Connect to a published dataset

import xarray as xr
import zarr
from fsspec.implementations.http import HTTPFileSystem

fs = HTTPFileSystem()
http_map = fs.get_mapper('http://0.0.0.0:9000')

# open as a zarr group
zg = zarr.open_consolidated(http_map, mode='r')

# open as another xarray dataset
xr.open_zarr(http_map, consolidated=True)

Why?

xpublish lets you serve/share/publish xarray datasets via a web application. The data in the xarray datasets (on the server side) can be backed by dask to facilitate on-demand computation via a simple REST API. We are exploring applications of xpublish that include:

• publish on-demand derived data products
• turning xarray objects into streaming services (e.g. OPENDAP)

How?

Under the hood, xpublish is using a web app (FastAPI) that is exposing a minimal Zarr compatible REST-like API. Key attributes of the API are:

• serves a Zarr store API from the root of the dataset
• provides Zarr metadata keys (.zmetadata) as json strings.
• provides access to data keys (e.g. var/0.0.0) as binary strings.