powergate

README

Powergate

Powergate is a multitiered file storage API built on Filecoin and IPFS, and and index builder for Filecoin data. It's designed to be modular and extensible.

Join us on our public Slack channel for news, discussions, and status updates. Check out our blog for the latest posts and announcements.

Warning This project is still pre-release and is not ready for production usage.

Table of Contents

• Prerequisites
• Design
• Installation
• Localnet mode
• Production setup
• Tests
• Benchmark
• Contributing
• Changelog
• License

Prerequisites

To build from source, you need to have Go 1.14 or newer installed.

Design

Powergate is composed of different modules which can be used independently, and compose together to provide other higher-level modules.

Here's a high-level overview of the main components, and how Powergate interacts with IPFS and a Filecoin client:

Note in the diagram that the Lotus and Filecoin client node doesn't need to be in the same host where Powergate is running. They can, but isn't necessary.

📢 Deals module

The Deals module provides a lower layer of abstraction to a Filecoin client node. It provides simple APIs to store, watch, and retrieve data in the Filecoin network. Currently, it interacts with the Lotus client but we have plans to support other Filecoin clients.

👷 Indices and Reputation scoring

Powergate builds three indexes related to on-chain and off-chain data.

The Miners index provides processed data regarding registered miners (on-chain and off-chain), such as: total miner power, relative power, online status, geolocation, and more!

The Ask index provides a fast-retrieval up to date snapshot of miner's asking prices for data storage.

The Faults index provides history data about miners faults while proving their storage on-chain.

Built on top of the previous indexes, a Reputation module constructs a weighted-scoring system that allows to sort miners considering multiple on-chain and off-chain data, such as: compared price to the median of the market, low storage-fault history, power on network, and external sources (soon!).

⚡ FFS

This module provides a multitiered file storage API built on Filecoin and IPFS. Storing data on IPFS and Filecoin is as easy as expressing your desired configuration for storing a Cid.

Want to know more about this Powergate module? Check out the FFS design document and our presentation and demo at the IPFS Pinning Summit:

💫 API + CLI

Powergate expose modules functionalities through gRPC endpoints. You can explore our .proto files to generate your clients, or take advange of a ready-to-use Powergate Go and JS client. 🙌

We have a CLI that supports most of Powergate features.

To build and install the CLI, run:

$ make build-pow

The binary will be placed automatically in $GOPATH/bin which in general is in $PATH, so you can immediately run pow in your terminal.

You can read the generated CLI docs in this repo, or run pow with the --help flag to see the available commands:

$ pow --help
A client for storage and retreival of powergate data

Usage:
  pow [command]

Available Commands:
  asks        Provides commands to view asks data
  faults      Provides commands to view faults data
  ffs         Provides commands to manage ffs
  health      Display the node health status
  help        Help about any command
  miners      Provides commands to view miners data
  net         Provides commands related to peers and network
  reputation  Provides commands to view miner reputation data
  wallet      Provides commands about filecoin wallets

Flags:
  -h, --help                   help for pow
      --serverAddress string   address of the powergate service api (default "127.0.0.1:5002")

Use "pow [command] --help" for more information about a command.

Installation

Powergate installation involves running external dependencies, and wiring them correctly with Powergate.

External dependencies

Powergate needs external dependencies in order to provide full functionality, in particular a synced Filecoin client and a IPFS node.

Filecoin client

Currently, we support the Lotus Filecoin client but we plan to support other clients.

All described modules of Powergate need to comunicate with Lotus to build indices data, and provide storing and retrieving features in FFS. To install Lotus refer to its official documentation, taking special attention to its dependencies.

Fully syncing a Lotus node can take time, so be sure to check you're fully synced doing ./lotus sync status.

We also automatically generate a public Docker image targeting the master branch of Lotus. This image is a pristine version of Lotus, with a sidecar reverse proxy to provide external access to the containerized API. For more information, refer to textileio/lotus-build and its Dockerhub repository.

In short, a fully-synced Lotus node should be available with its API (127.0.0.1:1234, by default) port accessible to Powergate.

IPFS node

A running IPFS node is needed if you plan to use the FFS module.

If that's the case, you can refer here for installation instructions, or its Dockerhub repository if you want to run a contanerized version. Currently we're supporting v0.5.1. The API endpoint should be accessible to Powergate (port 5001, by default).

Since FFS HotStorage is pinning Cids in the IPFS node, Powergate should be the only party controlling the pinset of the node. Other systems can share the same IPFS node if can guarantee not unpinning Cids pinned by Powergate FFS instances.

Geolite database

Powergate needs an offline geo-location database to resolve miners country using their IP address. The same folder in which powd is executing, should have the Geolite2 database file GeoLite2-City.mmdb or you can pass the --maxminddbfolder flag to powd to specify the path of the folder containing GeoLite2-City.mmdb. You can copy this file from the GitHub repo at iplocation/maxmind/GeoLite2-City.mmdb. If you run Powergate using Docker, this database is bundeled in the image so isn't necessary to have extra considerations.

Server

To build the Powergate server, run:

make build-powd

You can run the -h flag to see the configurable flags:

$ powd -h
Usage of powd:
      --autocreatemasteraddr      Automatically creates & funds a master address if none is provided
      --debug                     Enable debug log level in all loggers.
      --devnet                    Indicate that will be running on an ephemeral devnet. --repopath will be autocleaned on exit.
      --ffsusemasteraddr          Use the master address as the initial address for all new FFS instances instead of creating a new unique addess for each new FFS instance.
      --gatewayhostaddr string    Gateway host listening address (default "0.0.0.0:7000")
      --grpchostaddr string       gRPC host listening address. (default "/ip4/0.0.0.0/tcp/5002")
      --grpcwebproxyaddr string   gRPC webproxy listening address. (default "0.0.0.0:6002")
      --ipfsapiaddr string        IPFS API endpoint multiaddress. (Optional, only needed if FFS is used) (default "/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/5001")
      --lotushost string          Lotus client API endpoint multiaddress. (default "/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/1234")
      --lotusmasteraddr string    Existing wallet address in Lotus to be used as source of funding for new FFS instances. (Optional)
      --lotustoken string         Lotus API authorization token. This flag or --lotustoken file are mandatory.
      --lotustokenfile string     Path of a file that contains the Lotus API authorization token.
      --maxminddbfolder string    Path of the folder containing GeoLite2-City.mmdb (default ".")
      --repopath string           Path of the repository where Powergate state will be saved. (default "~/.powergate")
      --walletinitialfund int     FFS initial funding transaction amount in attoFIL received by --lotusmasteraddr. (if set) (default 4000000000000000)

Localnet mode

Having a fully synced Lotus node can take a considerable amount of time and effort to mantain. We have built lotus-devnet which runs a local network with a sectorbuilder mock. This provides a fast way to spinup a local network where the sealing process if mocked, but the rest of the node logic is the same as production The localnet supports both 2Kib and 512Kib sectors, and the speed of block production is configurable. Refer to lotus-devnet readme for more information.

If you're interested in running Powergate and experiment with the CLI, the fastest way is to replace the Lotus client dependency with a running localnet, which runs a local Lotus client connected to a network with local miners.

A simple docker-compose setup is available that will run Powergate connected to a Lotus local network with 512Mib sectors and allows to use the gRPC API or CLI without any extra config flags 🎊

cd docker
make localnet

This will build Powergate powd, a Lotus local network with BIGSECTORS=false, a IPFS node and wire them correctly to be ready to use.

Note: Running BIGSECTORS=false make localnet will create the Lotus devent using 2Kib sectors. This may be more appropriate for certain development or testing scenarios. Important: make localnet will run with BIGSECTORS=false by default. Currently, there's a limitation which doesn't allow BIGSECTORS=true, please see here and give some thumbs-up to make some noise and increase its priority!

Here is a full example of using the local network: Terminal 1:

cd docker
make localnet

Wait for seeing logs about the height of the chain increase in a regular cadence.

Terminal 2:

make build
❯ head -c 700 </dev/urandom > myfile
❯ pow ffs create
> Instance created with id 0ac0fb4d-581c-4276-bd90-a9aa30dd4cb4 and token 883f57b1-4e66-47f8-b291-7cf8b10f6370
❯ pow ffs stage -t 883f57b1-4e66-47f8-b291-7cf8b10f6370 myfile
> Success! Cached file in FFS hot storage with cid: QmYaAK8SSsKJsJdtahCbUe7MZzQdkPBybFCcQJJ3dKZpfm
❯ pow ffs config push -w -t 883f57b1-4e66-47f8-b291-7cf8b10f6370 QmYaAK8SSsKJsJdtahCbUe7MZzQdkPBybFCcQJJ3dKZpfm
> Success! Pushed cid config for QmYaAK8SSsKJsJdtahCbUe7MZzQdkPBybFCcQJJ3dKZpfm to FFS with job id: 966dcb44-9ef4-4d2a-9c90-a8103c77c354
               JOB ID                   STATUS
966dcb44-9ef4-4d2a-9c90-a8103c77c354    Success
❯ pow ffs get  -t 883f57b1-4e66-47f8-b291-7cf8b10f6370 QmYaAK8SSsKJsJdtahCbUe7MZzQdkPBybFCcQJJ3dKZpfm myfile2
> Success! Data written to myfile2

In this example we created a random 700 bytes file for the test, but since the localnet supports 512Mib sectors you can store store bigger files.

Production setup

A production setup is also provided in the docker folder. It launches powd connected to lotus and ipfs, plus a set of monitoring components:

• Prometheus, which is the backend for metrics processing.
• Grafana, for metrics dashboard.
• cAdvisor, for container metrics.
• Lotus, node running on the current Testnet.
• IPFS, node running to back Powergate FFS.
• Powergate, wired with all of above components.

Depending on which network you want to connect to, you have to run different commands:

• make up, to connect to testnet.
• make nerpa-up, to connect to nerpa.

Remember that you should wait for Lotus to be fully-synced which might take a long time; you can check your current node sync status running lotus sync status inside the Lotus container. We also provide automatically generated Dockerhub images of Powergate server, see textile/powergate.

If you're interested in a more detailed explanation about Powergate installation, please refer to the installation docs.

Tests

We have a big set of tests for covering most important Powergate features.

For integration tests, we leverage our textileio/lotus-devnet configured with 2Kib sectors to provide fast iteration and CI runs.

If you want to run tests locally:

make test

It will auto-download any necessary dependencies and run all tests.

Benchmark

There's a dedicated binary to run benchmarks against a Powergate server. For more information see the specific README.

Soon we'll add benchmark results against real miners in the Testnet network, so stay tuned. ⌛

Contributing

This project is a work in progress. As such, there's a few things you can do right now to help out:

• Ask questions! We'll try to help. Be sure to drop a note (on the above issue) if there is anything you'd like to work on and we'll update the issue to let others know. Also get in touch on Slack.
• Open issues, file issues, submit pull requests!
• Perform code reviews. More eyes will help a) speed the project along b) ensure quality and c) reduce possible future bugs.
• Take a look at the code. Contributions here that would be most helpful are top-level comments about how it should look based on your understanding. Again, the more eyes the better.
• Add tests. There can never be enough tests.

Before you get started, be sure to read our contributors guide and our contributor covenant code of conduct.

Changelog

Changelog is published to Releases.

License

MIT