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Hadoop HDFS over HTTP - Documentation Sets
==========================================

HttpFS is a server that provides a REST HTTP gateway supporting all HDFS File System operations (read and write). And it is inteoperable with the **webhdfs** REST HTTP API.

HttpFS can be used to transfer data between clusters running different versions of Hadoop (overcoming RPC versioning issues), for example using Hadoop DistCP.

HttpFS can be used to access data in HDFS on a cluster behind of a firewall (the HttpFS server acts as a gateway and is the only system that is allowed to cross the firewall into the cluster).

HttpFS can be used to access data in HDFS using HTTP utilities (such as curl and wget) and HTTP libraries Perl from other languages than Java.

The **webhdfs** client FileSytem implementation can be used to access HttpFS using the Hadoop filesystem command (`hadoop fs`) line tool as well as from Java aplications using the Hadoop FileSystem Java API.

HttpFS has built-in security supporting Hadoop pseudo authentication and HTTP SPNEGO Kerberos and other pluggable authentication mechanims. It also provides Hadoop proxy user support.

How Does HttpFS Works?
----------------------

HttpFS is a separate service from Hadoop NameNode.

HttpFS itself is Java web-application and it runs using a preconfigured Tomcat bundled with HttpFS binary distribution.

HttpFS HTTP web-service API calls are HTTP REST calls that map to a HDFS file system operation. For example, using the `curl` Unix command:

* `$ curl http://httpfs-host:14000/webhdfs/v1/user/foo/README.txt` returns the contents of the HDFS `/user/foo/README.txt` file.

* `$ curl http://httpfs-host:14000/webhdfs/v1/user/foo?op=list` returns the contents of the HDFS `/user/foo` directory in JSON format.

* `$ curl -X POST http://httpfs-host:14000/webhdfs/v1/user/foo/bar?op=mkdirs` creates the HDFS `/user/foo.bar` directory.

User and Developer Documentation
--------------------------------

* [HttpFS Server Setup](./ServerSetup.html)

* [Using HTTP Tools](./UsingHttpTools.html)


