Replacing IPFS as the underlying layer

[pstashp]

In the current form, is it feasible to replace IPFS as the storage layer, with another ID-addressable platform?

[matheus23]

What are you trying to achieve @pstashp? Your question is quite broad and I feel like perhaps I'd be better at answering a more specific question.

I'll try anyways.

In terms of programs, rs-wnfs is not dependent on IPFS implementations. rs-wnfs is merely a library that you need to hook up with something else that actually stores the data.

But it builds upon IPFS standards including IPLD, CIDs, UnixFS and more, which make it exceptionally good at being compatible with existing IPFS implementations.
E.g. you can use kubo to store rs-wnfs and run ipfs pin on another machine to replicate a WNFS.
Or you can use ipfs get in kubo with a public WNFS' file CID to download that public file into your local file system.

However, whatever you hook rs-wnfs up with as a storage layer only needs to know about CIDs, because it needs to provide a blockstore implementation. People have already built blockstore adapters on top of amazon S3 or LevelDB, Web APIs like IndexedDB or native file systems.

[pstashp]

Thank you. I was indeed looking to see how easy it would be replace the datastore layer with something else like another blockchain (immutable) or S3 (mutable). With the sample adapter and your response, I think the answer is a clear yes.

Previously, I wasn't sure about that due to the reliance of IPLD (which made me think that any effort to replace the datastore from IPFS to something else would just be "in theory, it's possible, but some effort is needed")

[matheus23]

In principle, implementing the BlockStore doesn't require you to understand IPLD, however, we specifically make use of IPLD's property to list links to further blocks (CIDs) given a block and it's CID. This allows you to walk the whole DAG in order to package up state snapshots or diffs to send to other peers.

[DougAnderson444]

@matheus23 Philipp has anyone published their Blockstore impl over the Web APIs though?

[matheus23]

@DougAnderson444 there's now a helia BlockStore adapter for rs-wnfs:
https://github.com/shovelers/helia-wnfs

You can use that to hook up indexeddb to wnfs.

There's also the nest package: https://github.com/wnfs-wg/nest/ which also exposes an indexeddb based BlockStore IIRC.

[DougAnderson444]

Ok! Since those are in JavaScript, I might as well link to my wasm-bindgen version that can be used directly from Rust:

https://github.com/PeerPiper/peerpiper/blob/04847dd5ff96cd8d8ee0c4dbdb435830490be3fe/crates/peerpiper-browser/src/bindgen/blockstore_idb.rs#L121

This also binds to Helia's blockstore-idb but does it from Rust