Delegated Routing Practice

You can run an indexer locally or use a managed service like https://cid.contact, which is available for anyone to use. For the latter, your IPFS node must be reachable externally at the advertised addresses as the indexer verifies providers' reachability.

Prerequisites

Have GO v1.18+ installed.

Make sure that GOPATH/bin is on your PATH

$ export GOPATH=$HOME/go
$ export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin

Set up local indexer (Optional)

An indexer can be setup as per these instructions.

TLDR;

Install storetheindex:

$ go install github.com/filecoin-project/storetheindex@v0.4.28

Initialize the storetheindex repository and configuration:

$ storetheindex init

Start the indexer

$ storetheindex daemon

Set up Kubo

Install Kubo v0.16.0 as per instructions here, or use already configired node. It's important to make sure that you are on v0.16.0+ version of Kubo or otherwise Reframe won't work.

Initialise Kubo configuration

$ ipfs init

Setup a custom routing by adding the following configuration block into ~/.ipfs/config

ipfs config Routing --json  '{
  "Type": "custom",
  "Methods": {
    "find-peers": {
      "RouterName": "WanDHT"
    },
    "find-providers": {
      "RouterName": "ParallelHelper"
    },
    "get-ipns": {
      "RouterName": "WanDHT"
    },
    "provide": {
      "RouterName": "ParallelHelper"
    },
    "put-ipns": {
      "RouterName": "WanDHT"
    }
  },
  "Routers": {
    "CidContact": {
      "Parameters": {
        "Endpoint": "http://127.0.0.1:50617"
      },
      "Type": "reframe"
    },
    "ParallelHelper": {
      "Parameters": {
        "Routers": [
          {
            "IgnoreErrors": true,
            "RouterName": "CidContact",
            "Timeout": "30m"
          },
          {
            "ExecuteAfter": "2s",
            "IgnoreErrors": true,
            "RouterName": "WanDHT",
            "Timeout": "30m"
          }
        ]
      },
      "Type": "parallel"
    },
    "WanDHT": {
      "Parameters": {
        "AcceleratedDHTClient": true,
        "Mode": "dhtserver",
        "PublicIPNetwork": true
      },
      "Type": "dht"
    }
  }
}'

Start the IPFS node:

$ ipfs daemon

Take a note of the Identity.PeerID from the Kubo config.

Set up index-provider

Index-provider can be set up as per these instructions.

TLDR;

Install index-provider:

$ go install github.com/filecoin-project/index-provider/cmd/provider@v0.9.0

Initialise the index-provider repository and configuration:

$ provider init

Add a direct http announcement (optional) and Reframe configuration:

$ vim ~/.index-provider/config

Add the following configuration block replacing the ProviderID with the kubo node peer ID grabbed at the previous step:

 "DirectAnnounce": {
    "URLs": [
      "http://127.0.0.1:3001" 
    ]
  },
  "Reframe": {
    "ListenMultiaddr": "/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/50617",
    "ChunkSize": 1,
    "SnapshotSize": 100,
    "ProviderID": "KUBO_NODE_PEER_ID", 
    "Addrs": [         
      "/ip4/0.0.0.0/tcp/4001",
      "/ip6/::/tcp/4001",
      "/ip4/0.0.0.0/udp/4001/quic",
      "/ip6/::/udp/4001/quic"
    ]
  }

Start the index-provider:

$ provider daemon

See all in action

Open up a WebUI at http://127.0.0.1:5001/webui and upload a file.

Take a not of its CID.

Once upoloaded you should see logs start rolling in storetheindex and indexprovider command lines.

Check whether your cid got indexed by executing

$ storetheindex find --cid

Or look it up in Kubo

ipfs routing findprovs YOUR_CID