InterPlanetary File System

Full Title

The InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a protocol and peer-to-peer network for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS uses content-addressing to uniquely identify each file in a Global Namespace connecting all computing devices.

Context

• IPFS was first deployed in 2015 and grew by word-of-mouth as a replacement to HTTP for static content.
• It allows users to host content as well as to search for it.
• If users do not wish to host content, they can access IPFS by a public gateway.

Windows

The context of this wiki page is windows, but the typical context of go is GNU so some helpful translations are

• ~ tilde is the same as $HOME which in Powershell is $env:USERPROFILE
• ~/ipfs is the default directory for all things ispf include the config file

Installing

• go ipfs installation instructions
• go ipfs on Github from Google has installation and test advice using the command line interpreter (CLI) instructions.

For Windows using chocolatey.

> choco install go-ipfs
> ipfs init
> ipfs daemon

By default the client looks for a daemon at http://localhost:5001. This can be overridden by either setting the environment variable IpfsHttpUrl or initializing the client with an URL.

// js-ipfs likes this address
static readonly IpfsClient ipfs = new IpfsClient("http://127.0.0.1:5002");

Test to see if the daemon is running by typing this in your browser.

http://localhost:5001/ipfs/bafybeianwe4vy7sprht5sm3hshvxjeqhwcmvbzq73u55sdhqngmohkjgs4/#/

Solutions

• the [Sidetree] protocol uses IPFS to insure that Identifiers are unique.