Filecoin Filecoin Liftoff - the Main Event, 22 Oct 2020

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: The Filecoin API

Description

Sneak peek of Infura’s soon-to-launch managed Filecoin API, which allows you to access chain data or use as a node for your miner.

Join us for Filecoin Liftoff Week, an action-packed series of talks, workshops, and panels curated by the web3 community to celebrate the Filecoin mainnet launch and chart the network’s future. https://liftoff.filecoin.io/

Events take place all week, October 19-23, 2020. #FilecoinLiftoff
For more information on Filecoin
- visit the project website: https://filecoin.io/
- or follow Filecoin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Filecoin

Get Filecoin community news and announcements in your inbox, monthly: http://eepurl.com/gbfn1n

Chapters
00:00 Introduction
01:05 Infura Demo
06:25 Making API requests

A

Hi everyone thanks for having me, and unfortunately, I didn't get to spend as much time preparing for this as I wanted.

A

The past week has been super busy uh getting our falcon api actually launched, and if you saw in the announcements in the file coin slack today or in our blog, our social media, it is actually live today, not soon to be live, and so um I have prepared a quick demo just to show you guys kind of how it works, how you can sign up how you can get access to it and just some really basic usage of it and then we're super excited to see what sort of apps you guys come up with that you can build using this.

A

uh So if you're not familiar with infira, um if you're newer to the ecosystem or if you just haven't been doing as much stuff with ethereum or ipfs and fury's been around, for, I think a little over five years now uh as a way to interact with the ethereum blockchain. That makes it really simple for developers. So um it's pretty well known that running ethereum nodes can be difficult. It requires a lot of storage, uh keeping it synced. All the time is hard. It's gonna always be running just kind of a pain.

A

If all you want to do is like run, some queries against the blockchain and so inferior has provided an endpoint that lets you just directly access that data without having to do all of that operations yourself, and so we launched with support for ethereum, and then I think about three years ago. We added support for ibfs as well, and since then those have been the only two protocols that we've supported, but today we are launching our file system network api.

A

So if you've used infire before the same way that you're able to access, ethereum and ipfs you'll now be able to do that for filecoin as well, uh so yeah, I'm just going to show you how to uh sign up and get access to the filecoin api and then I'll show you some examples of using it really quickly. So uh inferior.io is our website. uh Many of you may have an account already, but if you don't super easy to get one, we have a very short form for signing up.

A

I'm just going to create a new account here.

A

A

And then off screen, I'm just going to be waiting a second for that email and accepting it.

A

Here we go, and so now, if you go to the inferior dashboard previously, where you would have just seen ethereum, you will now see filecoin and if you come here, you see some information uh about filecoin about our network api, some links to documentation various things. But if you want to get started, you can just click this button to join the wait list and we're just doing this to kind of ease ourselves into supporting this and make sure that we don't overwhelm our api right away.

A

But so far we've been letting people in pretty quickly, but I have another account I'm going to sign into that's already been approved. So I can show you guys what that looks.

A

A

Great so once you have been approved to the waitlist, you will see this screen, and this looks very similar to what the ethereum dashboard looks like if you've seen that I have a couple of projects already here, I'm going to go ahead and actually delete this one and recreate it, which I meant to do earlier, but delete this and so yeah once you're here, you can create a new project, give it any name.

A

You like we'll go with filecoin liftoff, and then this is the project setting screen, and so this is also very familiar if you've used our ethereum api before and so the only thing that we really care about here are these keys. So these are going to be the keys that actually let us access the api.

A

The same as the ethereum api you'll have a project id and a project secret. The project id is required. The project secret is optional for ethereum. You can force the secret to be used so that, if you're, if you're calling the api from like a a back-end server, you can make sure that it's an authenticated request that uh no one else is using your key. uh We will be adding that very safer file coin, but for right now it doesn't exist. You can either use just the id or the id in the secret.

A

Okay, oops one other thing I wanted to show from here. So if we go back out to file coin, you can either from this docs link here, or this will also take you to it. We have some new docs that we've been working on for filecoin you'll, see these for ethereum too, uh but they're really nice. They use uh open api specs for the various apis and so they're really rich. You can see all the methods that are supported uh examples off the parameters, all sorts of uh really nice documentation.

A

um If we look at, for example, like chain head, we can even like go look at the results, and I believe some of these have some rich information for the results as well. We're still working at this around this, but you should be able to see like the fields in there and what exactly? What sort of data it's going to return for you.

A

I have a feeling that a lot of people on this call are actually more familiar with this api than I am. I have been working on the infrastructure to run this api, but I am by no means an expert on file. Point or its api, so uh if anything, I'm doing seems silly just uh bear with me, but we're going to do a couple requests here.

A

And I'm just grabbing something off screen at the.

A

Moment- and so this is just a curl uh request that I'm doing here doing a json rpc request, and so this is the filecoin.chainhead method and I'm just providing my project id here as the username for basic auth to do this, and then filecoin.io is the endpoint for our api, and so we'll run this and of course it did not work because I didn't actually copy my new secret.

A

So let's go grab.

A

A

Try that again here we go a bunch of data, and this is, I believe, it's called a tip set. um I could be wrong about that, but it is all the data that gets returned for the chain head and this is really hard to see, especially since I've blown it up so things that are a bit more visible.

A

So I'm going to take that json, that's returned and just grab a parameter out of it, so I'm using a cli called jq. I just parsed this json, but it's going to return again. I forgot to replace the key.

A

It's just going to return a field from that response.

A

There we go so the current height of the chain, it says, is one six, six, nine, seven, seven, let's go look and explore real, quick and see. If that agrees it does so that's great. uh So that's just a really basic uh request. Show you guys one other.

A

uh This is tip set by height, so we can then take uh that same block height, one six, six, nine, seven, seven and use it in another request, and I think this really is actually the same information, uh but just gives you another quick example of the sort of requests you can do.

A

Yep there we go, there's the tip set and then the last thing I want to show you. There are also some methods that use websockets and so, in addition to the http api, we also support websocket api. So I'm going to use a little utility called wscat.

A

It's a node.js utility, I'm running it within npx. I don't have to install it, but the endpoint looks very similar, we'll just it's now a websocket protocol. Our project id is the user for basic auth and then filecoin.io.

A

So we'll connect to that and now we're connected and so on this websocket protocol. We can do the same sort of requests we were doing before so here's chain head, for example- and we can see that the height has now gone up a little bit, but there's also some other methods that are more interesting for websockets. So there's one called filecoin.chain notify to actually subscribe us over this websocket to get updates about the chain as it progresses.

A

So we'll run that, and it is now actually streaming the blocks to us as they come over this easy to access and we've got a uh question here uh from a friend of mine, actually who I had joined um I'll answer. It says: uh can you talk about if there are how rate limits are for the new filecoin api? uh So right now there is just a 10 request per second to rate limit for all users. um If you find that that is extremely limiting, definitely reach out to us and we can maybe increase it.

A

um The api is free right now, while it's in beta, so we don't want to let anyone go too crazy, but if you find it doesn't work for your use cases, definitely let us know and we'll work with you to to find something that works for you and as for my demo, that's it does anyone have any other questions all right. Another question: do we maintain private keys for signing, so no so similar to our ethereum api?

A

We do not maintain any private keys for users, so there are some methods in ethereum, for example, to send a transaction where normally it would sign with the private key that is stores that we don't support so for ethereum, for example, we instead support a method called send raw transaction, where you must sign the transaction with your own private key beforehand and then send it to us and we'll make sure it's forwarded to the network and, I believe, there's sort of a similar concept in filecoin, but again not being an expert on the api.

A

I can't tell you what that method, that we don't support and what its equivalent might be I'll. Let the filecoin team take it back unless there's any other questions, you.