Bitswap Retrieval
How to configure and use bitswap retrievals in Boost
Last updated
How to configure and use bitswap retrievals in Boost
Last updated
booster-bitswap is a binary that runs alongside the boostd process, to serve retrievals over the Bitswap protocol. This feature of boost provides a number of tools for managing a production grade Bitswap retrieval service for a Storage Provider's content.
There is currently no payment method in booster-bitswap. This endpoint is intended to serve free content.
Bitswap retrieval introduces interoperability between IPFS and Filecoin, as it enables clients to retrieve Filecoin data over IPFS. This expands the reach of the Filecoin network considerably, increasing the value proposition for users to store data on the Filecoin network. This benefits the whole community, including SPs. Users will be able to access data directly via IPFS, as well as benefit from retrieval markets (e.g. Saturn) and compute over data projects (e.g. Bacalhau).
Booster-bitswap modesThere are two primary "modes" for exposing booster-bitswap to the internet.
In private mode the booster-bitswap peer ID is not publicly accessible to the internet. Instead, public Bitswap traffic goes to boostd itself, which then acts as a reverse proxy, forwarding that traffic on to booster-bitswap. This is similar to the way one might configure Nginx as a reverse proxy for an otherwise private web server. private mode is simpler to setup but may produce greater load on boostd as a protocol proxy.
In public mode the public internet firewall must be configured to forward traffic directly to the booster-bitswap instance. boostd is configured to announce the public address of booster-bitswap to the network indexer (the network indexer is the service that clients can query to discover where to retrieve content). This mode offers greater flexibility and performance. You can even setup booster-bitswap to run over a separate internet connection from boostd. However, it might require additional configuration and changes to your overall network infrastructure.
You can configure booster-bitswap in the demo mode and familiarise yourself with the configuration. Once you are confident and familiar with the options, please go ahead and configure booster-bitswap for production use.
1. Clone the the boost repo and checkout the latest stable release
2. Build the booster-bitswap binary:
3. Initialize booster-bitswap:
4. Record the peer ID output by booster-bitswap init -- we will need this peer id later
5. Collect the boost API Info
6. Run booster-bitswap
7. By default, booster-bitswap runs on port 8888. You can use --port to override this behaviour
8. Fetching over bitswap by running
Where peerID is the peer id recorded when you ran booster-bitswap init and rootCID is the CID of a data CID known to be stored on your SP.
booster-bitswap To Serve RetrievalsAs described above, booster-bitswap can be configured to serve the retrievals in 2 modes. We recommend using public mode to avoid greater load on boostd as a protocol proxy.
1. Clone the main branch from the boost repo
2. Build the booster-bitswap binary:
3. Initialize booster-bitswap:
4. Record the peer ID output by booster-bitswap init -- we will need this peer id later
5. Stop boostd and edit ~/.boost/config.toml to set the peer ID for bitswap
6. Start boostd service again
7. Collect the boost API Info
8. Run booster-bitswap
You can get a boostd multiaddress by running boostd net listen and using any of the returned addresses
9. By default, booster-bitswap runs on port 8888. You can use --port to override this behaviour
10. Try to fetch a payload CID over bitswap to verify your configuration
1. Clone the release/booster-bitswap branch from the boost repo
2. Build the booster-bitswap binary:
3. Initialize booster-bitswap:
4. Record the peer ID output by booster-bitswap init -- we will need this peer id later
5. Stop boostd and edit ~/.boost/config.toml to set the peer ID for bitswap
The libp2p private key file for booster-bitswap can generally be found at <booster-bitswap repo path>/libp2p.key
The reason boost needs to know the public multiaddresses and libp2p private key for booster-bitswap is so it can properly announce these records to the network indexer.
6. Start boostd service again
7. Collect the boost API Info
8. Run booster-bitswap
9. By default, booster-bitswap runs on port 8888. You can use --port to override this behaviour
10. Try to fetch a payload CID over bitswap to verify your configuration
Booster-bitswap configurationbooster-bitswap provides a number of performance and safety tools for managing a production grade bitswap server without overloading your infrastructure.
Depending on your hardware you may wish to increase or decrease the default parameters for the bitswap server internals. In the following example we are increasing the worker count for various components up to 600. This will utilize more CPU and I/O, but improve the performance of retrievals. See the command line help docs for details on each parameter.
Booster-bitswap is automatically setup to deny all requests for CIDs that are on the BadBits Denylist. The default badbits list can be override or addition badbits list can be provided to the booster-bitswap instance.
booster-bitswap provides a number of controls for filtering requests and limiting resource usage. These are expressed in a JSON configuration file <booster-bitswap repo>/retrievalconfig.json
You can create a new retrievalconfig.json file if one does not exists
To make changes to the current configuration, you need to edit the retrievalconfig.json file and restart booster-bitswap for the changes to take affect. All configs are optional and absent parameters generally default to no filtering at all for the given parameter.
You can also configure booster-bitswap to fetch your retrieval config from a remote HTTP API, possibly one provided by a third party configuration tool like CIDGravity. To do this, start booster-bitswap with the --api-filter-endpoint {url} option where URL is the HTTP URL for an API serving the above JSON format. Optionally, add --api-filter-auth {authheader}, if you need to pass a value for the HTTP Authorization header with your API
When you setup with an API endpoint, booster-bitswap will update its local configuration from the API every five minutes, so you won't have to restart booster-bitswap to make a change. Please, be aware that the remote config will overwrite, rather than merge, with the local config.
Limiting bandwidth within booster-bitswap will not provide the optimal user experience. Dependent on individual setup, setting up limitations within the software could have a larger impact on the storage provider operations. Therefore, we recommend storage providers to set up their own bandwidth limitations using existing tools.
There are multiple options to setup bandwidth limitating.
At the ISP level - dedicated bandwidth is provided to the node running booster-bitswap.
At the router level - we recommend configuring the bandwidth at the router level as it provides more flexibility and can be updated as needed. To configure the bandwidth on your router, please check with your manufacturer.
Limit the bandwidth using different tools available in Linux. Here are some of the examples of such tools. Please feel free to use any other tools not listed here and open a Github issue to add your example to this page.
TC is used to configure Traffic Control in the Linux kernel. There are examples available online detailing how to configure rate limiting using TC.
You can use the below commands to run a very basic configuration.
Trickle is a portable lightweight user space bandwidth shaper, that either runs in collaborative mode (together with trickled) or in standalone mode. You can read more about rate limiting with trickle here. Here's a starting point for configuration in trickle to rate limit the booster-bitswap service.
Another way of controlling network traffic is to limit bandwidth on individual network interface cards (NICs). Wondershaper is a small Bash script that uses the tc command-line utility in the background to let you regulate the amount of data flowing through a particular NIC. As you can imagine, while you can use wondershaper on a machine with a single NIC, its real advantage is on a machine with multiple NICs. Just like trickle, wondershaper is available in the official repositories of mainstream distributions. To limit network traffic with wondershaper, specify the NIC on which you wish to restrict traffic with the download and upload speed in kilobits per second.
For example,
