IPFS CLI Setup

Background

In this tutorial you can get started by installing kubo (formerly go-ipfs), and starting & stopping a node

Prerequisites

Instructions

Video – Getting Started with IPFS

This video is the basic setup for kubo on a linux machine, using wget to grab the resources. You will also ipfs init a node and get it running with ipfs daemon.

Install kubo (go-ipfs)

Refer to the IPFS Docs’ installation instructions for the operating system you are using.

Initialize an IPFS Node

First you will want to verify that you have ipfs correctly installed on your machine.

  • Run the command ipfs --version to check it is installed. If you don’t get a version number, try uninstalling & installing again.

Before you can run the ipfs daemon, you have to initialize and instance of IPFS on your machine, creating a node identity identified with peer identity: in the output of the CLI.

  • Run ipfs init in the CLI

In the folder where you have initialized your node, you should be able to see a config file called .ipfs, which has data about your node. Run the command to list the directories as a long list (-l) where hidden (-a) files aren’t ignored

ls -la

➜ drwxr-xr-x   10 <folder/name>  staff          320 Sep 12 17:37 .ipfs

You can change directory (cd) into the .ipfs directory to see the contents of the config file and list (-ls) the contents:

cd .ipfs

➜  .ipfs ls
api            blocks         config         datastore      datastore_spec keystore       repo.lock      version

Start an IPFS Node

Now that an instance had been created on your machine, you can start your IPFS node which will communicate and share data with other nodes on the network.

  • Run ipfs daemon in the CLI to start your new node.

When you run ipfs daemon, if you get the error: lock <path>/.ipfs/repo.lock: someone else has the lock, it means there is another instance running on your machine. Use the command killall ipfs and try again

Stop an IPFS Node

When the IPFS node is running, any information you have pinned to that node is available, and you are able to retrieve data from the public IPFS network without a gateway.

You may, however want to stop your node from time to time, and you can do so by pressing cntrl + c twice in a row in the same terminal it’s running in, or typing killall ipfs in another window.

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