Experiment in MFS-based cohosting

Exploration around simple tools and conventions for cohosting existing websites with IPFS

Motivation

• Make it easier for people to contribute storage and bandwidth to sites and datasets they care about
  • Support IPNS (libp2p keys) and DNSLink roots (human-readable)
  • Switch tools like ipfs-cohost and ipfs-companion from raw pins to MFS
• Periodically detect updates to and preload them to a local node
• Experiment in userland: make it easy to implement, no new APIs, reuse existing ones
  • Identify constraints of the mutable filesystem (MFS) and propose ways to improve it

Scope vs. Use Cases

See this analysis.

Specification

See SPEC.md

🚧 note: this is a draft, an early, exploratory experiment 🚧

Feedback is welcome. Fill an issue!

Potential Implementations

This specification is not implemented yet. The following IPFS Shipyard projects could implement it:

🍎 = Not started
🍊 = In progress
🍏 = Complete

🍊 cohosting.sh

MVP bash script that can be used for cli

• [x] add rm for adding / removing sites to cohosting list via commandline
• [x] sync a command to run cohosting check (for use in crond etc)
• [x] gc [n] drop all old snapshots (if n is provided, keeps that many snapshots per site)
• [ ] Lazy cohosting

🍏 ipfs-cohost

NPM-based interactive cli tool

• [x] switch from pin to MFS-based spec

🍎 ipfs-companion

browser extension

• [ ] provides UI for adding / removing sites via browser action menu
• [ ] runs cohosting check periodically

🍎 ipfs-desktop

desktop app and GUI for managing go-ipfs

• [ ] runs cohosting check periodically

🍎 ipfs-webui

web frontend for IPFS node

• [ ] provides UI for adding / removing sites to cohosting list as an experiment on Settings page