ipfs-check

ipfs-check

Check if you can find your content on IPFS

A debugging tool for checking the retrievability of data by IPFS peers

Documentation

Build

go build will build the server binary in your local directory

Install

go install will build and install the server binary in your global Go binary directory (e.g. ~/go/bin)

Deploy

There are web assets in web that interact with the Go HTTP server that can be deployed however you deploy web assets. Maybe just deploy it on IPFS and reference it with DNSLink.

For anything other than local testing you're going to want to have a proxy to give you HTTPS support on the Go server.

When deploying to prod, since the addition of telemetry (https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs-check/pull/30) you will also need to run the following before serving the web assets:

cd web
npm install && npm run build

At a minimum, the following files should be available from your web-server on prod: web/index.html, web/tachyons.min.css, web/dist/telemetry.js.

Docker

There's a Dockerfile that runs the tool in docker.

docker build -t ipfs-check .
docker run -d ipfs-check

Running locally

Terminal 1

go build
./ipfs-check # Note listening port.. output should say something like "listening on [::]:3333"

Terminal 2

# feel free to use any other tool to serve the contents of the /web folder (you can open the html file directly in your browser)
npx -y serve -l 3000 web
# Then open http://localhost:3000?backendURL=http://localhost:3333

Running a check

To run a check, make an http call with the cid and multiaddr query parameters:

$ curl "localhost:3333/check?cid=bafybeicklkqcnlvtiscr2hzkubjwnwjinvskffn4xorqeduft3wq7vm5u4&multiaddr=/p2p/12D3KooWRBy97UB99e3J6hiPesre1MZeuNQvfan4gBziswrRJsNK"

Note that the multiaddr can be:

• A multiaddr with just a Peer ID, i.e. /p2p/PeerID. In this case, the server will attempt to resolve this Peer ID with the DHT and connect to any of resolved addresses.
• A multiaddr with an address port and transport, and Peer ID, e.g. /ip4/140.238.164.150/udp/4001/quic-v1/p2p/12D3KooWRTUNZVyVf7KBBNZ6MRR5SYGGjKzS6xyiU5zBeY9wxomo/p2p-circuit/p2p/12D3KooWRBy97UB99e3J6hiPesre1MZeuNQvfan4gBziswrRJsNK. In this case, the Bitswap check will only happen using the passed multiaddr.

Check results

The server performs several checks given a CID. The results of the check are expressed by the output type:

type output struct {
	ConnectionError          string
	PeerFoundInDHT           map[string]int
	CidInDHT                 bool
	ConnectionMaddrs         string[]
	DataAvailableOverBitswap BitswapCheckOutput
}

type BitswapCheckOutput struct {
	Duration  time.Duration
	Found     bool
	Responded bool
	Error     string
}

1. Is the CID (really multihash) advertised in the DHT (or later IPNI)?

• CidInDHT

1. Are the peer's addresses discoverable (particularly useful if the announcements are DHT based, but also independently useful)

• PeerFoundInDHT

1. Is the peer contactable with the address the user gave us?

• If ConnectionError is any empty string, a connection to the peer was successful. Otherwise, it contains the error.
• If a connection is successful, ConnectionMaddrs contains the multiaddrs that were used to connect. If the peer is behind NAT, it will contain both the circuit relay multiaddr and the direct maddr.

1. Is the address the user gave us present in the DHT?

• If PeerFoundInDHT contains the address the user passed in

1. Does the peer say they have at least the block for the CID (doesn't say anything about the rest of any associated DAG) over Bitswap?

• DataAvailableOverBitswap contains the duration of the check and whether the peer responded and has the block. If there was an error, DataAvailableOverBitswap.Error will contain the error.

Metrics

The ipfs-check server is instrumented and exposes two Prometheus metrics endpoints:

• /metrics/libp2p exposes go-libp2p metrics.
• /metrics/http exposes http metrics for the check endpoint.

Securing the metrics endpoints

To add HTTP basic auth to the two metrics endpoints, you can use the --metrics-auth-username and --metrics-auth-password flags:

./ipfs-check --metrics-auth-username=user --metrics-auth-password=pass

Alternatively, you can use the IPFS_CHECK_METRICS_AUTH_USER and IPFS_CHECK_METRICS_AUTH_PASS env vars.

License

SPDX-License-Identifier: Apache-2.0 OR MIT