What is Online Drive?

Online Drive or in short just Drive Service is an online cloud storage similar to Dropbox or Google Drive which provides the possibility to upload and share files and folders with other users and systems.

This service is especially helpful for workflows when it comes to file and document sharing.

PIPEFORCE has such a cloud storage “built-in”, so it is easy to share and distribute files and documents across teams and systems via pipelines and workflows.

For this, PIPEFORCE has integrated the very popular Nextcloud storage service. This service is used in many production environments all around the world.

You can access this online service through a URL like this:

https://drive-NAMESPACE.pipeforce.net

You have to replace NAMESPACE by the https://logabit.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PA/pages/2543222858 of your instance. After opening it in the browser and login you should see the Nextcloud WebUI similar to this:

Drive Commands

In order to automate the file and folder management on the drive folder, you can use the built-in drive commands in your pipelines.

Here is an example pipeline which downloads a word document from drive, converts it to a PDF and then uploads it back to drive:

pipeline:
  - drive.read:
      path: some/folder/contract.doc
      
  - transform.word2pdf
  
  - drive.save:
      path: some/folder/contract.pdf

When working with drive commands, you should also become familiar with the concept of https://logabit.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PA/pages/2545320099 since some of the commands accept and return this data type.

These drive commands are available as built-in:

drive.copy - Copy a file or folder.
drive.delete - Delete a file or folder.
drive.exists - Check if a file or folder exists.
drive.list - List a given folder.
drive.mkdir - Create a folder.
drive.move - Move a file or folder.
drive.read - Download a file or folder.
drive.save - Upload a file or folder.
drive.share - Share a file with other users and systems.
drive.tag - Put a tag on a file.
drive.archive.save - Archives the given file into an archive folder. The file will be verified and finally gets a unique archive number so it can be used for compliance and documentation purposes.
drive.upload.chunked - Upload big files as chunks.

You can use these commands as part of your pipelines. Also you can call them using the PIPEFORCE RestAPI in order to access the drive storage via REST in a common way from external systems. See the RestAPI docs: https://logabit.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/PA/pages/2549874757 .

Sync Client

Sometimes it is required to periodically synchronize files and folders from a mobile or local storage to the online service and back. For this, you can use the free Nextcloud Sync Client.

The installation steps are quite easy:

Download the client which fits your system from https://nextcloud.com/de/clients/.
Install the client and start it.
When asked, Login to your existing online drive. As URL use https://drive-NAMESPACE.pipeforce.net whereas you have to replace NAMESPACE by your own .
Your browser should open in order to do the OAuth authentication. This will look similar to this:
Click Log in and login with your credentials.
After this you are done and the sync client should start syncing in the background.

Switch to other Cloud Storage

Nexctloud is the default storage provider, linked to PIPEFORCE. There is also the possibility to switch this to other storages. If required, talk to our support team about the options.