Lesson: Initialize your IPFS Repository
Goals
After doing this Lesson you will be able to
Initialize a local ipfs repository
Locate where IPFS stores the contents of your local IPFS repository
Open the IPFS Configuration file
Steps
Step 1: Initialize the Repository
Use the ipfs init command to initialize the repository. This will generate a local ipfs repository for the current user account on your machine. It also generates a cryptographic keypair that allows your ipfs node to cryptographically sign the content and messages that you create.
Note: If you have already initialized ipfs on your machine, you will get an error message like:
This is ok. It means you've already done this step. You can safely proceed to Step 2.
Step 2: Use IPFS to explore the post-install documentation
If you installed a different version of ipfs, you may have gotten a slightly different path to use here. Either path will work for this tutorial. The path you got from the ipfs init command will give you documentation that's accurate for the version of ipfs you're using.
When you ran ipfs init, it provided a hint for how you can get started. It said:
This ipfs cat command tells ipfs to read the content matching the path you provided. If the content isn't available locally, ipfs will attempt to find it on the peer-to-peer network.
In order to run the following command, the ipfs daemon must be running. In order to run the ipfs daemon, type ipfs daemon &. This will start the ipfs daemon and place it into the background of your current console.
Run the ipfs cat command with the path you got from the init message:
You should see something like this:
You can explore other objects in there. For example, check out security-notes:
Step 3: Locate where IPFS Stores the Repository Contents on your Machine
ipfs stores its local object repository in ~/.ipfs
The contents of that directory look like this:
All of the contents of your IPFS repository are stored within this directory. For example, the readme file from above is stored in here, along with the other files it links to. You can run a grep to find out the exact location.
Step 4: Open the IPFS Configuration file
The configuration for your ipfs repository is in a json file that's usually stored at ~/.ipfs/config. To view the current config, run:
One of the useful details in this config file is at Datastore.Path. This tells you where the ipfs repository's contents are being stored. As we saw in Step 3, this is usually ~/.ipfs
Next Steps
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