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Hector Sanjuan 2c3085586c Documentation: bring in line to 0.3.0 Review documentation to be in line with latest updates to Raft and any other feature introduced since 0.12.0. License: MIT Signed-off-by: Hector Sanjuan <hector@protocol.ai>		2017-11-14 19:26:49 +01:00
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LICENSE	Put tools README into dist/ folder	2017-03-03 17:52:43 +01:00
README.md	Documentation: bring in line to 0.3.0	2017-11-14 19:26:49 +01:00

README.md

`ipfs-cluster-service`

IPFS cluster peer daemon

ipfs-cluster-service runs a full IPFS Cluster peer.

Usage

Usage information can be obtained with:

$ ipfs-cluster-service -h

Initialization

Before running ipfs-cluster-service for the first time, initialize a configuration file with:

$ ipfs-cluster-service init

init will randomly generate a cluster_secret (unless specified by the CLUSTER_SECRET environment variable or running with --custom-secret, which will prompt it interactively).

All peers in a cluster must share the same cluster secret. Using an empty secret may compromise the security of your cluster (see the documentation for more information).

Configuration

After initialization, the configuration will be placed in ~/.ipfs-cluster/service.json by default.

You can add the multiaddresses for the other cluster peers to the cluster.peers or cluster.bootstrap variables (see below). A configuration example with explanations is provided in A guide to running IPFS Cluster.

The configuration file should probably be identical among all cluster peers, except for the id and private_key fields. Once every cluster peer has the configuration in place, you can run ipfs-cluster-service to start the cluster.

Clusters using `cluster.peers`

The peers configuration variable holds a list of current cluster members. If you know the members of the cluster in advance, or you want to start a cluster fully in parallel, set peers in all configurations so that every peer knows the rest upon boot. Leave bootstrap empty. A cluster peer address looks like: /ip4/1.2.3.4/tcp/9096/<id>.

The list of cluster.peers is maintained automatically and saved by ipfs-cluster-service when it changes.

Clusters using `cluster.bootstrap`

When the peers variable is empty, the multiaddresses in bootstrap (or the --bootstrap parameter to ipfs-cluster-service) can be used to have a peer join an existing cluster. The peer will contact those addresses (in order) until one of them succeeds in joining it to the cluster. When the peer is shut down, it will save the current cluster peers in the peers configuration variable for future use (unless leave_on_shutdown is true, in which case it will save them in bootstrap).

Bootstrap is a convenient method to sequentially start the peers of a cluster. Only bootstrap clean nodes which have not been part of a cluster before (or clean the ipfs-cluster-data folder). Bootstrapping nodes with an old state (or diverging state) from the one running in the cluster will fail or lead to problems with the consensus layer.

When setting the leave_on_shutdown option, or calling ipfs-cluster-service with the --leave flag, the node will attempt to leave the cluster in an orderly fashion when shutdown. The node will be cleaned up when this happens and can be bootstrapped safely again.

Debugging

ipfs-cluster-service offers two debugging options:

--debug enables debug logging from the ipfs-cluster, go-libp2p-raft and go-libp2p-rpc layers. This will be a very verbose log output, but at the same time it is the most informative.
--loglevel sets the log level ([error, warning, info, debug]) for the ipfs-cluster only, allowing to get an overview of the what cluster is doing. The default log-level is info.