Repository¶

A Pachyderm repository is a location where you store your data inside Pachyderm. A Pachyderm repository is a top-level data object that contains files and folders. Similar to Git, a Pachyderm repository tracks all changes to the data and creates a history of data modifications that you can access and review. You can store any type of file in a Pachyderm repo, including binary and plain text files.

Unlike a Git repository that stores history in a .git file in your copy of a Git repo, Pachyderm stores the history of your commits in a centralized location. Because of that, you do not run into merge conflicts as you often do with Git commits when you try to merge your .git history with the master copy of the repo. With large datatsets resolving a merge conflict might not be possible.

A Pachyderm repository is the first entity that you configure when you want to add data to Pachyderm. You can create a repository with the pachctl create repo command, or by using the Pachyderm UI. After creating the repository, you can add your data by using the pachctl put file command.

A Pachyderm repo name can include alphanumeric characters, dashes, and underscores, and should be no more than 63 characters long.

The following types of repositories exist in Pachyderm:

Input repositories

Users or external applications outside of Pachyderm can add data to the input repositories for further processing.

Output repositories

Pachyderm automatically creates output repositories pipelines write results of computations into these repositories.

You can view the list of repositories in your Pachyderm cluster by running the pachctl list repo command.

$ pachctl list repo
NAME     CREATED     SIZE (MASTER)
raw_data 6 hours ago 0B

The pachctl inspect repo command provides a more detailed overview of a specified repository.

$ pachctl inspect repo raw_data
Name: raw_data
Description: A raw data repository
Created: 6 hours ago
Size of HEAD on master: 5.121MiB

If you need to delete a repository, you can run the pachctl delete command. This command deletes all data and the information about the specified repository, such as commit history. The delete operation is irreversible and results in a complete cleanup of your Pachyderm cluster. If you run the delete command with the --all flag, all repositories will be deleted.