IPFS Learning Resources, 10 Feb 2022

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From YouTube: IPFS Basics: Accessing Files

Description

In this tutorial, you can follow along to understand the basics of how you as a user can access, add, and pin files in IPFS. Follow along with the examples to learn about pinning and adding files, how files from IPFS can be previewed and inspected, and learn a bit about how that data is created and stored on IPFS.

This content is creates as a part of Protocol Labs' Launchpad program at https://protocol-labs.gitbook.io/launchpad-curriculum/

Find out more at protocol.io or on twitter: @protocol

Chapters
00:00 Start
00:19 ipfs swarm peers
00:37 Accessing Files with the CLI on IPFS
00:56 ipfs cat
01:10 ipfs get
01:31 Adding Data to an IPFS Node
01:48 ipfs add
02:14 ipfs pin ls --type=all
02:48 ipfs DAG inspector
02:58 ipfs pin add
03:14 Ipfs refs -r

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Welcome to this video about the basics of working with files in ipfs follow, along with the examples to learn about pinning and adding files and how that data is created and stored on ipfs.

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You should have already run ipfs init and you can start a daemon with the ipfs daemon command open. A terminal mine is for a linux shell and use the command ipfs swarm peers.

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This command will give you a list of peers that you were already connected to for sharing data or network operations on ipfs.

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Next, we are going to look at different ways of accessing files that already exist on the ipfs network.

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What I'm looking at here is the ipfs desktop client, which allows you to explore some ipfs files that are on the ipfs network, I'm going to copy the cid of a file and we'll use the commands, ipfs cat plus ipfs, plus the cid of that file, and you can see that with the cat command. I can read what's in the file.

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Another way of accessing this file is to download it onto your local machine. Here I am using the ipfs get command with the same cid and it will download the file onto my local machine.

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Now when I use ls to list the files you can see, it was downloaded in my local directory.

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If I use vim to open the file, you will see the contents of the same file that we saw before when you add a file to your ipfs node. Your files are broken down into blocks and then arranged in a graph known as the merkle tree in ipfs. A block refers to a single unit of data, and it's given a content, identifier or cid ipfs add is for adding data from your local machine to your node.

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When you do this, the file is added to your local ipfs node and the cid for that data will become accessible or broadcast to the network by default. When you use ipfs ad for file, this data is pinned to your node, which means it is available to the network. You can also pin a piece of data from elsewhere on the network.

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If you take a look at your pin files using ipfs pin list with the type all flag, you will notice that the file you just added is now in graph form. All data is turned into a graph, so it can be split up and sent over the network, and it's a recursive link now understand.

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Looking at the ipfs pin data that the files marked as recursive mean that you have pinned a block of data and its child blocks, while the indirect cids that show up are child blocks that were pinned as a result of the parent node being pinned recursively data that is added to ipfs is broken up into smaller chunks and stored in something called the unix fs data format enabled to make it possible to seed data from many sources on the network.

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It is also possible to pin data from the ipfs network onto your node without having to download the data to the machine hosting the node. When you pin a piece of data that data is made available by you to the network from your node.

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Now that this information is pinned on your note, you can use the command ipfs refs with the r flag to see the links to that object. You just recursively pinned to your node.