storetheindex

README

StoreTheIndex 🗂️

The first place to go in order to find a CID stored in Filecoin

This repo provides an indexer implementation that can be used to index data stored by a range of participating storage providers.

Design

• About the Indexer
• Ingestion Process
• Creating an Index Provider

Current Status

Released for production: The current production release is running at https://cid.contact

This project and is currently under active development 🚧.

Install

This assumes go is already installed.

Install storetheindex:

go install github.com/ipni/storetheindex@latest

Initialize the storetheindex repository and configuration:

storetheindex init

Optionally, edit the configuration

edit ~/.storetheindex/config 

Running the Indexer Service

To run storetheindex as a service, run the daemon command. The service watches for providers to index, and exposes a query / content routing client interface.

The daemon is configured by the config file in the storetheindex repository. The config file and repo are created when storetheindex is initialized, using the init command. This repo is located in the local file system. By default, the repo is located at ~/.storetheindex. To change the repo location, set the $STORETHEINDEX_PATH environmental variable.

Provider Removal Policy

After a configured amount of time without any updates from a provider (PollInterval), the indexer will poll the provider at its last know publisher address, for any index updates. If there is no response from the provider after at least one attempt to poll, then the provider is considered inactive and is not returned in any find results. The indexer will continue polling on an interval (PollRetryAfter) until a time limit (PollStopAfter) is reached. If there is still no response to the poll attempts after this time limit is reached, then the provider is removed from the indexer and its records are garbage-collected and will need to be refetched.

The configuration values that control this are documented here, and their default values are specified here. A custom polling configuration may be applied for specific providers using the PollOverrides configuration value to specify per-provider Polling configuration.

Indexer CLI Commands

There are a number of client commands included with storetheindex. Their purpose is to perform simple indexing and lookup actions against a running daemon. These can be helpful to test that an indexer is working. These include the following commands:

Informational:

• find Find value by CID or multihash in indexer
• providers Show information about providers known to the indexer
  • get Get information about a specified provider
  • list List the known providers

Administrative:

• admin Perform admin activities with an indexer
  • allow Allow advertisements and content from peer
  • block Block advertisements and content from peer
  • import-providers Import provider information from another indexer
  • reload-config Reload various settings from the configuration file
  • sync Sync indexer with provider
• init Initialize or upgrade indexer node config file

Testing:

• import Imports data to indexer from different sources
• register Register provider information with an indexer
• synthetic Generate synthetic load to import in indexer

Help

To see a list of available commands, see storetheindex --help. For help with command usage, see storetheindex <command> --help.

Configuration

The storetheindex config file documentation

License

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR MIT