Connecting to your storage

Switching backends is a configuration change, not a code change. For the configuration keys of a specific service, see Services.

Unlike the Rust core, the Python wheel includes every service — there are no build flags. Once opendal is installed, every backend is available.

Build an operator

The first argument is the service scheme; configuration follows as keyword arguments:

import opendal

op = opendal.Operator(
    "s3",
    bucket="my-bucket",
    region="us-east-1",
    endpoint="https://s3.amazonaws.com",
)

A local filesystem operator roots every path under one directory:

op = opendal.Operator("fs", root="/tmp/opendal")

Use opendal.AsyncOperator with the same arguments for the async API.

Credentials

Credentials are just more configuration keys. Set them as keyword arguments — for example S3's access_key_id and secret_access_key:

op = opendal.Operator(
    "s3",
    bucket="my-bucket",
    region="us-east-1",
    access_key_id="...",
    secret_access_key="...",
)

Some services also load credentials from their platform's default sources (for S3, the standard AWS environment variables and profiles). See each service's page under Services for the exact keys and credential behavior.

Avoid hard-coding secrets in source. Read them from the environment or a secret manager and pass them in when you build the operator:

import os
import opendal

op = opendal.Operator(
    "s3",
    bucket="my-bucket",
    region="us-east-1",
    access_key_id=os.environ["AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"],
    secret_access_key=os.environ["AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"],
)

One operator per service and root

An operator maps to one service and one root path. To work with two buckets or two roots, build two operators — they are lightweight and safe to share.