Object expiration

You can schedule Object Storage (swift) objects to expire by setting the X-Delete-At or X-Delete-After header. Once the object is deleted, swift will no longer serve the object and it will be deleted from the cluster shortly thereafter.

• Set an object to expire at an absolute time (in Unix time). You can get the current Unix time by running date +'%s'.

  $ swift post CONTAINER OBJECT_FILENAME -H "X-Delete-At:UNIX_TIME"
  

  Verify the X-Delete-At header has posted to the object:

  $ swift stat CONTAINER OBJECT_FILENAME
  

• Set an object to expire after a relative amount of time (in seconds):

  $ swift post CONTAINER OBJECT_FILENAME -H "X-Delete-After:SECONDS"
  

  The X-Delete-After header will be converted to X-Delete-At. Verify the X-Delete-At header has posted to the object:

  $ swift stat CONTAINER OBJECT_FILENAME
  

  If you no longer want to expire the object, you can remove the X-Delete-At header:

  $ swift post CONTAINER OBJECT_FILENAME -H "X-Remove-Delete-At:"
  

Note

In order for object expiration to work properly, the swift-object-expirer daemon will need access to all backend servers in the cluster. The daemon does not need access to the proxy-server or public network.