What is Camlistore?

Camlistore is your personal storage system for life.

Note that it's a "storage system", not just a "file system". It can store and be accessed like a traditional filesystem, but it specializes in representing higher-level objects which don't need to exist in purely one place in a tree. (e.g. a photo, a comment, a "like", a blog post) Or a tree of 5TB videos with Unix mode bits that you can access via a FUSE filesystem. Whatever.

It is:

• a way to store, sync, share, model and back up content
• everything private by default
• entirely under your control
• Open Source (Apache licensed)
• an acronym for "Content-Addressable Multi-Layer Indexed Storage", saying that Camlistore is about:
  • content-addressable storage, at the lowest layer ("Like git for all content in your life")
  • separate interoperable parts (storage, sync, sharing, modeling), with well-defined protocols and roles
  • indexing and searching your content
• your "home directory for the web"
• pro-JSON (yet aggressively format agnostic)
• pro-OpenPGP (for signing claims)
• pro-paranoia and privacy
• ambitious, but ...
• simple!
• programming language-agnostic (parts and different implementations in Go, Python, Java, Perl, Bash, ... the language doesn't matter.) What matters is well-defined, simple HTTP interfaces.
• neither "Cloud" nor "Local". happily both. Run it on your own machine (any OS, any architecture), your phone, EC2, App Engine, Heroku, whatever.
• a "20% project" from a few Google employees (and non-Googlers), but not Google-centric nor endorsed by Google (other than them letting us open source our side project)

Latest Release

The latest release is 0.1 ("Grenoble"), released 2013-06-11.

Old presentations

See http://camlistore.org/talks/2011-05-07-Camlistore-Sao-Paolo/.

There's also this older presentation.