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 # Garage
 
-THIS IS ALL WORK IN PROGRESS. NOTHING TO SEE YET BUT THANKS FOR YOUR INTEREST.
+Garage is a lightweight S3-compatible distributed object store, with the following goals:
 
-Garage implements an S3-compatible object store with high resiliency to network failures, machine failure, and sysadmin failure.
+- As self-contained as possible
+- Easy to set up
+- Highly resilient to network failures, network latency, disk failures, sysadmin failures
+- Relatively simple
+- Made for multi-datacenter deployments
 
-## To log:
+Non-goals include:
+
+- Extremely high performance
+- Complete implementation of the S3 API
+- Erasure coding (our replication model is simply to copy the data as is on several nodes)
+
+Our main use case is to provide a distributed storage layer for small-scale self hosted services such as [Deuxfleurs](https://deuxfleurs.fr).
+
+## Setting up Garage
+
+Use the `genkeys.sh` script to generate TLS keys for encrypting communications between Garage nodes.
+The script takes no arguments and will generate keys in `pki/`.
+This script creates a certificate authority `garage-ca` which signs certificates for individual Garage nodes.
+Garage nodes from a same cluster authenticate themselves by verifying that they have certificates signed by the same certificate authority.
+
+Garage requires two locations to store its data: a metadata directory, and a data directory.
+The metadata directory is used to store metadata such as object lists, and should ideally be located on an SSD drive.
+The data directory is used to store the chunks of data of the objects stored in Garage.
+In a typical deployment the data directory is stored on a standard HDD.
+
+Garage does not handle TLS for its S3 API endpoint. This should be handled by adding a reverse proxy.
+
+Create a configuration file with the following structure:
 
 ```
-RUST_LOG=garage=debug cargo run --release -- server -c config_file.toml
+block_size = 1048576			# objects are split in blocks of maximum this number of bytes
+
+metadata_dir = "/path/to/ssd/metadata/directory"
+data_dir = "/path/to/hdd/data/directory"
+
+rpc_bind_addr = "[::]:3901"		# the port other Garage nodes will use to talk to this node
+
+bootstrap_peers = [
+	# Ideally this list should contain the IP addresses of all other Garage nodes of the cluster.
+	# Use Ansible or any kind of configuration templating to generate this automatically.
+	"10.0.0.1:3901",
+	"10.0.0.2:3901",
+	"10.0.0.3:3901",
+]
+
+[rpc_tls]
+# NOT RECOMMENDED: you can skip this section if you don't want to encrypt intra-cluster traffic
+# Thanks to genkeys.sh, generating the keys and certificates is easy, so there is NO REASON NOT TO DO IT.
+ca_cert = "/path/to/garage/pki/garage-ca.crt"
+node_cert = "/path/to/garage/pki/garage.crt"
+node_key = "/path/to/garage/pki/garage.key"
+
+[s3_api]
+api_bind_addr = "[::1]:3900"	# the S3 API port, HTTP without TLS. Add a reverse proxy for the TLS part.
+region = "garage"				# set this to anything. S3 API calls will fail if they are not made against the region set here.
 ```
 
-## What to repair
+Build Garage using `cargo build --release`.
+Then, run it using either `./target/release/garage server -c path/to/config_file.toml` or `cargo run --release -- server -c path/to/config_file.toml`.
+
+Set the `RUST_LOG` environment to `garage=debug` to dump some debug information.
+Set it to `garage=trace` to dump even more debug information.
+Set it to `garage=warn` to show nothing except warnings and errors.
+
+## Setting up cluster nodes
+
+Once all your `garage` nodes are running, you will need to:
+
+1. check that they are correctly talking to one another;
+2. configure them with their physical location (in the case of a multi-dc deployment) and a number of "ring tokens" proportionnal to the storage space available on each node;
+3. create some S3 API keys and buckets;
+4. ???;
+5. profit!
+
+To run these administrative tasks, you will need to use the `garage` command line tool and it to connect to any of the cluster's nodes on the RPC port.
+The `garage` CLI also needs TLS keys and certificates of its own to authenticate and be authenticated in the cluster.
+A typicall invocation will be as follows:
+
+```
+./target/release/garage --ca-cert=pki/garage-ca.crt --client-cert=pki/garage-client.crt --client-key=pki/garage-client.key <...>
+```
+
+
+## Notes to self
+
+### What to repair
 
 - `tables`: to do a full sync of metadata, should not be necessary because it is done every hour by the system
 - `versions` and `block_refs`: very time consuming, usefull if deletions have not been propagated, improves garbage collection