39a-connect

README

39a-connect

Painlessly connect to the 39 Alpha Research IPFS gateway https://gateway.39alpharesearch.org/.

When downloading content from IPFS, you generally benefit by being directly connected to an IPFS peer which can provide the data you are looking for. If that's not the case, then your request will have to crawl around a bit until such a node is found. Since all of 39 Alpha's data is pinned to our IPFS gateway node, you can expedite downloads by first establishing a peer connection.

As part of our general API, we provide the GET https://39alpharesearch.org/api/v0/ipfs/addr endpoint which responds with our IPFS multiaddrs. What 39a-connect does is simply make a request to our API and then establish a connection using your local node's POST /api/v0/swarm/connect.

Getting Started

Provided you have Go installed, you can install 39a-connect by running

$ go get -u github.com/39alpha/ipfs-tools/39a-connect

Usage

For the most part, all you have to do is

$ 39a-connect

And you are done!

Additional Flags

The command takes only a handful of command line flags.

Usage: 39a-connect [OPTIONS]

Establish a peer-to-peer connection to the 39 Alpha gateway node.

Options:
  -api string
    	39A API version (default "api/v0")
  -ipfsurl string
    	URL to running IPFS node (default "127.0.0.1:5001")
  -v	Print verbose status messages

The most useful flag is -v which simply prints the status of the connection process, in particular the multiaddr you're connecting to:

$ 39a-connect -v
Connecting to /ip4/44.241.131.183/udp/4001/quic/p2p/12D3KooWADaUtfpf7hahJooJoxB9fNgMcb7kXRUWkvFmPT1kxb5Q ... done
$ ipfs swarm peers | grep 12D3KooWADaUtfpf7hahJooJoxB9fNgMcb7kXRUWkvFmPT1kxb5Q
/ip4/44.241.131.183/udp/4001/quic/p2p/12D3KooWADaUtfpf7hahJooJoxB9fNgMcb7kXRUWkvFmPT1kxb5Q

In the event that you have a non-standard IPFS configuration, you may need to specify the address and port at which your local node is listening for API requests. That can be done with the -ipfsurl flag:

$ 39a-connect -ipfsurl 127.0.0.1:8080
ERROR: cannot establish connection to IPFS shell — shell is not up

Of course, if your node is not actually listening there, you'll get an error message.