⚠️ ⚠️ Deprecated in favor of Ceramic ⚠️ ⚠️

3box.js and related tools built by 3Box Labs are deprecated and no loger supported. Developers are encurraged to build with https://ceramic.network which is a more secure and decentralized protocol for sovereign data.

3Box pinning node

The pinning node is an ipfs and orbit-db node that persists the data of 3box users.

Requirements

• node v10
• python v2

Run as command line tool

# Install via npm
(sudo) npm install 3box-pinning-node --global
# Install via yarn
yarn global add 3box-pinning-node
# Run node
(sudo) 3box-pinning-node

Pubsub messages

request to pin

This message is sent from a 3box-js client when openBox is called.

{
  type: 'PIN_DB',
  odbAddress: <orbit-db address>
}

length response

This message is sent from the pinning node as a response to PIN_DB.

{
  type: 'HAS_ENTRIES',
  odbAddress: <orbit-db address>,
  numEntries: <the number of entries that the pinning node has for the given db>
}

replicated response

This message is sent from the pinning node when a db has been replicated.

{
  type: 'REPLICATED',
  odbAddress: <orbit-db address>,
}

Configuration

Configurations for both production and development environments can be found in both .env.production and .env.development respectively. The pinning service also runs a profile caching service. This can be disabled by running (i.e. you only require the pinning node) the following command instead.

$ (sudo) npm run start -- --runCacheService=false

The profile caching service also uses a Redis cache to cache requests. This is disabled by default in development. And can generally be disabled by not setting the env variable REDIS_PATH.

To only handle a subset of pinning requests, you can use the DID and space whitelist options. These are configured with the PIN_WHITELIST_DIDS and PIN_WHITELIST_SPACES environment variables, which are comma-separated lists (no whitespace between items). For example:

PIN_WHITELIST_DIDS=did:3:bafyreie2i5l7fttwgzluctidfgbskyx47gjl2illqmbpp3vh4axacxpkqm,did:3:bafyreigwzej3toirnjur5ur3z3qwefnmrwonhlpok5dapfmgmc2i3sv2je
PIN_WHITELIST_SPACES=abc,def

In addition, the PIN_SILENT environment variable can be set to true if the pinning node should not send responses to pin and sync requests (on private and 3rd party nodes, for example).

Maintainers

@zachferland