ipfs/kubo v0.18.0

on GitHub

• 🎤 Discuss
• 🔦 Highlights
  • Content routing
    • Default InterPlanetary Network Indexer
    • Increase provider record republish interval and expiration
  • Gateways
    • DAG-JSON and DAG-CBOR response formats
    • 🐎 Fast directory listings with DAG sizes
  • QUIC and WebTransport
    • WebTransport enabled by default
    • QUIC and WebTransport share a single port
    • Differentiating QUIC versions
    • QUICv1 and WebTransport config migration
  • Improving libp2p resource management integration
• 📝 Changelog
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Contributors

🔦 Highlights

Content routing

Default InterPlanetary Network Indexer

Content routing is the process of discovering which peers provide a piece of content. Kubo has traditionally only supported libp2p's implementation of Kademlia DHT for content routing.

Kubo can now bridge networks by including support for the delegated routing HTTP API. Users can compose content routers using the Routing.Routers config to pick content routers with different tradeoffs than a Kademlia DHT (e.g., high-performance and high-capacity centralized endpoints, dedicated Kademlia DHT nodes, routers with unique provider records, privacy-focused content routers).

One example is InterPlanetary Network Indexers, which are HTTP endpoints that cache records from both the IPFS network and other sources such as web3.storage and Filecoin. This improves not only content availability by enabling Kubo to transparently fetch content directly from Filecoin storage providers, but also improves IPFS content routing latency by an order of magnitude and decreases resource consumption.

Note: it's possible to retrieve content stored by Filecoin Storage Providers (SPs) from Kubo if the SPs service Bitswap requests. As of this release, some SPs are advertising Bitswap. You can follow the roadmap progress for IPNIs and Bitswap in SPs here.

In this release, the default content router is changed from dht to auto. The auto router includes the IPFS DHT in addition to the cid.contact IPNI instance. In future releases, we plan to expand the functionality of auto to encompass automatic discovery of content routers, which will improve performance and content availability (for example, see IPIP-342).

Previous behavior can be restored by setting Routing.Type to dht.

Alternative routing rules, including alternative IPNI endpoints, can be configured in Routing.Routers after setting Routing.Type to custom.

Learn more in the Routing docs.

Increase provider record republish interval and expiration

Default Reprovider.Interval changed from 12h to 22h to match new defaults for the Provider Record Expiration (48h) in go-libp2p-kad-dht v0.20.0.

The rationale for increasing this can be found in
RFM 17: Provider Record Livenes Report,
kubo#9326,
and the upstream DHT specifications at libp2p/specs#451.

Learn more in the Reprovider config.

Gateways

(DAG-)JSON and (DAG-)CBOR response formats

The IPFS project has reserved the corresponding media types at IANA:

• application/vnd.ipld.dag-json
• application/vnd.ipld.dag-cbor

This release implements them as part of IPIP-328
and adds Gateway support for CIDs with json (0x0200), cbor (0x51),
dag-json (0x0129)
and dag-cbor (0x71) codecs.

To specify the response Content-Type explicitly, the HTTP client can override
the codec present in the CID by using the format parameter
or setting the Accept HTTP header:

• Plain JSON: ?format=json or Accept: application/json
• Plain CBOR: ?format=cbor or Accept: application/cbor
• DAG-JSON: ?format=dag-json or Accept: application/vnd.ipld.dag-json
• DAG-CBOR: ?format=dag-cbor or Accept: application/vnd.ipld.dag-cbor

In addition, when DAG-JSON or DAG-CBOR is requested with the Accept header
set to text/html, the Gateway will return a basic HTML page with download
options, improving the user experience in web browsers.

Example 1: DAG-CBOR and DAG-JSON Conversion on Gateway

The Gateway supports conversion between DAG-CBOR and DAG-JSON for efficient
end-to-end data structure management: author in CBOR or JSON, store as binary
CBOR and retrieve as JSON via HTTP:

$ echo '{"test": "json"}' | ipfs dag put # implicit --input-codec dag-json --store-codec dag-cbor
bafyreico7mjtqtqhvawro3yud5uqn6sc33nzqb7b5j2d7pdmzer5nab4t4

$ ipfs block get bafyreico7mjtqtqhvawro3yud5uqn6sc33nzqb7b5j2d7pdmzer5nab4t4 | xxd
00000000: a164 7465 7374 646a 736f 6e              .dtestdjson

$ ipfs dag get bafyreico7mjtqtqhvawro3yud5uqn6sc33nzqb7b5j2d7pdmzer5nab4t4 # implicit --output-codec dag-json
{"test":"json"}

$ curl "http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/bafyreico7mjtqtqhvawro3yud5uqn6sc33nzqb7b5j2d7pdmzer5nab4t4?format=dag-json"
{"test":"json"}

Example 2: Traversing CBOR DAGs

Placing a CID in CBOR Tag 42 enables the
creation of arbitrary DAGs. The equivalent DAG-JSON notation for linking
to different blocks is represented by { "/": "cid" }.

The Gateway supports traversing these links, enabling access to data
referenced by structures other than regular UnixFS directories:

$ echo '{"test.jpg": {"/": "bafybeigdyrzt5sfp7udm7hu76uh7y26nf3efuylqabf3oclgtqy55fbzdi"}}' | ipfs dag put
bafyreihspwy3zlkzgphmec5d3xb5g5njrqwotd46lyubnelbzktnmsxkq4 # dag-cbor document linking to unixfs file

$ ipfs resolve /ipfs/bafyreihspwy3zlkzgphmec5d3xb5g5njrqwotd46lyubnelbzktnmsxkq4/test.jpg
/ipfs/bafybeigdyrzt5sfp7udm7hu76uh7y26nf3efuylqabf3oclgtqy55fbzdi

$ ipfs dag stat bafyreihspwy3zlkzgphmec5d3xb5g5njrqwotd46lyubnelbzktnmsxkq4
Size: 119827, NumBlocks: 2

$ curl "http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/bafyreihspwy3zlkzgphmec5d3xb5g5njrqwotd46lyubnelbzktnmsxkq4/test.jpg" > test.jpg

Example 3: UnixFS directory listing as JSON

Finally, Gateway now supports the same logical format projection from
DAG-PB to DAG-JSON as the ipfs dag get command, enabling the retrieval of directory listings as JSON instead of HTML:

$ export DIR_CID=bafybeigccimv3zqm5g4jt363faybagywkvqbrismoquogimy7kvz2sj7sq
$ curl -H "Accept: application/vnd.ipld.dag-json" "http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/$DIR_CID" | jq
$ curl "http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/$DIR_CID?format=dag-json" | jq
{
  "Data": {
    "/": {
      "bytes": "CAE"
    }
  },
  "Links": [
    {
      "Hash": {
        "/": "Qmc3zqKcwzbbvw3MQm3hXdg8BQoFjGdZiGdAfXAyAGGdLi"
      },
      "Name": "1 - Barrel - Part 1 - alt.txt",
      "Tsize": 21
    },
    {
      "Hash": {
        "/": "QmdMxMx29KVYhHnaCc1icWYxQqXwUNCae6t1wS2NqruiHd"
      },
      "Name": "1 - Barrel - Part 1 - transcript.txt",
      "Tsize": 195
    },
    {
      "Hash": {
        "/": "QmawceGscqN4o8Y8Fv26UUmB454kn2bnkXV5tEQYc4jBd6"
      },
      "Name": "1 - Barrel - Part 1.png",
      "Tsize": 24862
    }
  ]
}
$ ipfs dag get $DIR_CID
{"Data":{"/":{"bytes":"CAE"}},"Links":[{"Hash":{"/":"Qmc3zqKcwzbbvw3MQm3hXdg8BQoFjGdZiGdAfXAyAGGdLi"},"Name":"1 - Barrel - Part 1 - alt.txt","Tsize":21},{"Hash":{"/":"QmdMxMx29KVYhHnaCc1icWYxQqXwUNCae6t1wS2NqruiHd"},"Name":"1 - Barrel - Part 1 - transcript.txt","Tsize":195},{"Hash":{"/":"QmawceGscqN4o8Y8Fv26UUmB454kn2bnkXV5tEQYc4jBd6"},"Name":"1 - Barrel - Part 1.png","Tsize":24862}]}

🐎 Fast directory listings with DAG sizes

Fast listings are now enabled for all UnixFS directories: big and small.
There is no linear slowdown caused by reading size metadata from child nodes,
and the size of DAG representing child items is always present.

As an example, the CID
bafybeiggvykl7skb2ndlmacg2k5modvudocffxjesexlod2pfvg5yhwrqm represents a UnixFS
directory with over 10k files. Listing big directories was fast
since Kubo 0.13, but in this release it will also include the size column.

QUIC and WebTransport

WebTransport enabled by default

WebTransport is a new libp2p transport that was introduced in v0.16 that is based on top of QUIC and HTTP3.

This allows browser-based nodes to contact Kubo nodes, so now instead of just serving requests for other system-level application nodes, you can also serve requests directly to a node running inside a browser page.

For the full story see connectivity.libp2p.io.

QUIC and WebTransport share a single port

WebTransport is enabled by default in part because go-libp2p now supports running WebTransport and QUIC transports on the same QUIC listener. No additional port needs to be opened.

To use this feature, register two listen addresses on the same /ipX/.../udp/XXX prefix.

Differentiating QUIC versions

go-libp2p now differentiates the first version of QUIC that was originally implemented, Draft-29, from the ratified protocol in RFC9000, QUICv1.
This was done for performance (time to first byte) reasons as outlined here.

This manifests as two different multiaddr components /quic (old Draft-29) and /quic-v1.
go-libp2p do supports listening with both QUIC versions on one single listener.
WebTransport has only supported QUICv1.
/webtransport now needs to be prefixed by a /quic-v1 component instead of a /quic component.

Support for QUIC Draft-29 will be removed at some point in 2023 (tracking issue). As a result, new deployements should use /quic-v1 instead of /quic.

QUICv1 and WebTransport config migration

To support QUICv1 and WebTransport by default a new config migration (v13) is run which automatically adds entries in addresses-related fields:

• Replace all /quic/webtransport to /quic-v1/webtransport.
• For all /quic listeners, keep the Draft-29 listener, and on the same ip and port, add /quic-v1 and /quic-v1/webtransport listeners.

Improving libp2p resource management integration

To help protect nodes from DoS (resource exhaustion) and eclipse attacks,
Kubo enabled the go-libp2p Network Resource Manager
by default in Kubo 0.17.

Introducing limits like this by default after the fact is tricky,
and various improvements have been made to improve the UX including:

1. Dedicated docs concerning the resource manager integration. This is a great place to go to learn more or get your FAQs answered.
2. Increasing the default limits for the resource manager.
3. Enabling the Swarm.ConnMgr by default and reducing it thresholds so it can intelligently prune connections in many cases before the indiscriminate resource manager kicks in.
4. Adjusted log messages and levels to make clear that the resource manager is likely doing your node a favor by bounding resources.
5. Other miscellaneous config and command bugs reported by users.

📝 Changelog

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Contributors