rust-ipfs?

[adamski]

I'm looking around for an IPFS implementation I can use in a cross-platform desktop/mobile application. I've been playing with https://github.com/Agorise/c-ipfs, but it seems to be incomplete and unstable from my testing.

I don't necessary need a full IPFS implementation, but would ideally like to be able to interact with nodes powered by go-ipfs. My use case is "offline first" application user data storage, and I'd like to replace my current dependency on Couchbase server infastructure with IPFS.

In order to use this library I would need to create a C++ wrapper for it, but it seems that things are moving and changing fast here so I wonder if its better to wait until the API has settled?

[whyrusleeping]

@adamski With a working libp2p, you can simply connect to any existing ipfs node and start speaking the protocols you want. You would have to reimplement some of those, but the ipfs protocols are actually quite simple. Bitswap is just a single protobuf that you send to request blocks and receive (the same protobuf) to receive those blocks. You could probably implement cpp-ipfs using rust-libp2p pretty easily ;)

[adamski]

Great, thats very encouraging, thanks.

[adamski]

@whyrusleeping Coming back to this - are there any examples of using libp2p to speak to IPFS? Are there any docs that explain some of the terms here, e.g. "protobuf"?

[adamski]

@tomaka are you able to help with this at all? Any helpful links to similar JS code you can point me to?

[whyrusleeping]

are there any examples of using libp2p to speak to IPFS? Are there any docs that explain some of the terms here, e.g. "protobuf"?

Other than ipfs? (ipfs uses libp2p to talk to other ipfs nodes)

What bits do you want to do? If you just want to be able to fetch data from ipfs nodes, you'll want to implement bitswap. The go implementation of that is here: https://github.com/ipfs/go-bitswap

The raw protobuf message is defined here: https://github.com/ipfs/go-bitswap/blob/master/message/pb/message.proto

[adamski]

Yes, I just want to fetch and provide data to other IPFS nodes. Thanks for the links!

[adamski]

Does anyone here have a rough idea of days required to implement this? I'm in the process of applying for a research collaboration grant with a local university where implementing rust-ipfs will be the main focus. Thanks.

[tomaka]

Implementing the bitswap protocol (the name of the protocol used by IPFS) shouldn't be very difficult, as far as I know (I haven't looked into it). However you would also need to implement record stores in Kademlia (#146) and create the CLI interface.

[adamski]

Thanks. I assume that the Kademlia record store is for local storage of other nodes on the network? Would that be based on https://github.com/libp2p/interface-record-store, or more similar to https://github.com/libp2p/js-libp2p-kad-dht?

Is there any documentation that explains some of this stuff?

[tomaka]

Let's move the discussion to #146

[dvc94ch]

I got bitswap working. The weird thing is that I always get a negative response to find_provider. By hardcoding kademlia.find_node(GO_IPFS_PEER_ID.parse().unwrap()) when creating a new behaviour I'll receive the block if I restart the program a couple of times, I assume that is part of the bitswap strategy of the go ipfs node that decides based on previous transactions to send or not send the block.
Is this a symptom of #146 ?
Mmh, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. I can't look up the rust-libp2p node from the go ipfs impl.
Next thing to try is if I can get it to work without dht, using mdns and pubsub should work on the local network as an alternative I think.
Some mdns weirdness going on: mdns-scan detects the rust-libp2p and the google chromecast, but not the go-ipfs or js-ipfs daemons.

[tomaka]

The weird thing is that I always get a negative response to find_provider.

This might be caused by #694

[gnunicorn]

@dvc94ch do you have your code available online somewhere?

[dvc94ch]

There are still some issues with it. I can publish it this week, just haven't gotten around to it yet.