Assorted stuff

Recently my teammate told us about IPFS. It caught my attention, because I read about it before in this post. It seems like an interesting idea to crossbreed git and Bittorrent.

The project hasn't reached a stable state yet and it seems that none of the major Linux distributions package it downstream. Building it isn't too hard, but on my Debian 9 machin isn't trivial either. Debian stretch provides Go, which is the language of choice of IPFS developers, but it's only Go 1.7 (1.8 in stretch-backports) and IPFS requires Go 1.9.

So let's go step-by-step .

1. apt-get install golang-go. This installs Go 1.7, which is needed to build Go 1.9.
2. Download golang-1.9 sources for Debian buster.
3. Build the packages the ususal way (dpkg-source -x and dpkg-buildpackage).
4. Install them.

Here is where tweaking begins. First you need to set environment variables to make Go 1.9 the default.

mkdir $HOME/.go
export GOPATH=$HOME/.go:/usr/lib/go-1.9/
export PATH=/usr/lib/go-1.9/bin/:$PATH

At this point you can start following the instructions from the IPFS README.md file to download and build ipfs on your machine.

go get -u -d github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs
cd $HOME/.go/src/github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs
make build

Several go packages are required to build IPFS and they are downloaded automatically using gx package manager, which is a very interesting piece of software itself.

When everything is ready make install and you've got ipfs binary in $HOME/.go/bin. Don't forget to add this directory to your PATH.

Now the fun part begins: reading. I will definitely help if you already know how git works internally, but you need to lear how to do stuff with ipfs sub-commands. Aside from the official IPFS papers and documentation I strongly recommend reading An Introduction to IPFS.