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Mirror Network

A distributed and multistakeholder infrastructure

“Let us save what remains: not by vaults and locks which fence them from the public eye and use in consigning them to the waste of time, but by such a multiplication of copies, as shall place them beyond the reach of accident.”

— Thomas Jefferson

In order to prevent information loss, and simplify access to humankind’s software heritage, we are building an international network of mirrors.

A mirror is a full copy of the Software Heritage universal source code archive, operated in agreement with, but independently from the Software Heritage organization.

This page lists the current active mirrors, and gives you basic information on how to use them.

ENEA Mirror

The ENEA mirror is the first Software Heritage mirror to go in production. It was open to the public on the 13th of December 2023.

Access the mirror

Using a mirror

A mirror is a read-only copy of the main Software Heritage archive. As such, it must give access to the content of the archive, but it may not provide all the features the Software Heritage offers.

Provided features

Each mirror will:

  • be mostly up to date with the main archive, there can be some lag, but it should be minimal, usually less than a few hours (not guaranteed),
  • give public access to the web UI allowing to browse the archive,
  • allow to search by origin URL,
  • give public access to (most) the public API (rate limited),

Differences

A mirror will behave differently from the Software Heritage archive:

  • Save Code Now will redirect to the main Software Heritage,
  • Add Forge Now will redirect to the main Software Heritage,
  • there is no Deposit service,
  • statistics and counters are not displayed on the main page,
  • the replication being asynchronous, a mirror is only eventually consistent. An object might temporarily missing from the mirror resulting in a 404 error message when browsing the mirror.

Optional Features

A mirror may optionally provide some of the features of the Software Heritage archive:

  • advanced search engine,
  • extended metadata,
  • advanced graph query API (REST and GRPC),
  • authentication for increased rate limiting API access.