Download raw file contents from a specific commit

[spearce]

Originally reported on Google Code with ID 7

Support downloading the contents of a single file "as is" from Gitiles, for example:

 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest/+raw/master/default.xml

to get the raw XML rather than it wrapped inside of HTML.

This is a bit of a challenge because the server has cookies, and this is possibly unsafe
user supplied data. Raw HTML or JavaScript could cause the user's session to be able
to be hijacked.

Reported by None on 2012-11-11 15:30:45

[spearce]

Support downloading the contents of a single file "as is" from Gitiles, for example:

 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/manifest/+raw/master/default.xml

to get the raw XML rather than it wrapped inside of HTML.

This is a bit of a challenge because the server has cookies, and this is possibly unsafe
user supplied data. Raw HTML or JavaScript could cause the user's session to be able
to be hijacked.

Reported by None on 2012-11-11 15:30:45

[spearce]

Would providing a json format (issue 27) have less security concerns?  Chrome team has
tools which need to get current state of certain files.  This is currently done via
chromium svn servers but I'd like to transition these tools to use GoB.  An example
file which tools fetch is:  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/master/DEPS

Reported by None on 2013-05-05 18:10:31

[spearce]

Would it be sufficient to always set the content-type to something like "application/octet-stream"?
Are there any browsers that would attempt to parse/display that, rather than just downloading?
That might help avoid the browser hijacking issue, while still allowing easy programmatic
access from our tools.

Reported by None on 2013-05-06 09:14:52

[spearce]

Or another option, maybe always put the file(s) into a zip archive, which would force
downloading and unzipping, again avoiding browser handling of the content, but still
being pretty easy for scripts to deal with.

Reported by None on 2013-05-06 09:18:51

[spearce]

#1: JSON is a good idea, that would be easy to implement in the short term. Works for
the scripting case but we still want true raw file support for e.g. viewing in-repo
HTML.

#2: Unfortunately if you include a file with an <img> or <script> tag browsers are
still liable to do content sniffing regardless of Content-Type in the header :(. Modern
browsers will respect Content-Disposition: Attachment but older IEs may not. And again
we still want to support browsing raw HTML stored in the repo.

#3: Zip archive is another idea, but between that and JSON I think I prefer JSON :)

Reported by None on 2013-05-06 14:30:53

[spearce]

Also an issue for Google's "Skia" open-source project.  Details are at https://code.google.com/p/skia/issues/detail?id=1898
('git transition blocker: skia_tools.js needs to download tip-of-tree global_variables.json')

Reported by None on 2013-12-13 12:43:51

[spearce]

GitHub has this functionality (they serve raw blobs as text/plain). Are they just unaware
or unconcerned about the content-sniffing issue alluded to in #2?

Reported by None on 2014-01-07 17:41:51

[spearce]

github solves the problem of cookies by serving the raw URL from a different hostname;
i.e. https://github.com/dataarts/tailbone/blob/master/Guardfile is served raw from
https://raw.github.com/dataarts/tailbone/master/Guardfile

Could that work for gitiles?

Reported by None on 2014-02-06 15:42:00

[spearce]

Yes, for googlesource.com we plan to use a new, cookieless domain (and for open-source
Gitiles the domain will simply be configurable and we trust administrators to understand
the risks and implement their own cookie policy).

This quarter I plan to do JSON support and at least get the ball rolling with our security/domain
teams on the cookieless domain part.

Reported by None on 2014-02-06 15:47:58

[spearce]

Blocking:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=337030
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=345087
and some aspects of:
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=343251

Reported by None on 2014-03-10 09:44:14

[spearce]

Base64-encoded raw file support is checked in as:
https://gerrit-review.googlesource.com/55202

Example URL (won't work until this is released for googlesource.com):
https://gerrit.googlesource.com/gitiles/+/master/gitiles-servlet/src/main/java/com/google/gitiles/PathServlet.java?format=TEXT

Reported by None on 2014-03-14 21:28:22