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WEBUI.md

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Get your node up and running with the WebUI

In a private swarm, the default bootstrap nodes are not available to serve the WebUI at http://localhost:5001/webui.

To make available the WebUI without running the dev build every time, you will need a go-ipfs client which points to the correct location. The WebUI is served by the IPFS network, and the client hard-codes the hash of this location. Therefore, a custom client is needed in order to point to the correct hash.

Note: This only needs to be done once per private network. Once the boot node serves the WebUI, all other nodes only require the custom client which points to the correct hash. After the following steps, any node using the modified client will be able to use the WebUI at http://localhost:5001/webui.

0. Requirements

1. Install golang-1.10+

Building go-ipfs from source requires golang-1.10+.

add-apt-repository ppa:gophers/archive
apt update
apt install golang-1.10-go
echo "export PATH=/usr/lib/go-1.10/bin:$PATH" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc || bash

Confirm the install with go version.
If the version is still old, then you probably still have an old version of golang installed. Remove it.

2. Install the WebUI on the boot node

Why did we just install golang-1.10? We will need it when building the client from source.
But first we need the hash our client will point to.

  1. Clone the ipfs-webui repository.

    git clone https://github.com/ipfs-shipyard/ipfs-webui

  2. cd ipfs-webui && npm install

  3. Build to ./dist with npm run build

  4. Upload the directory ./dist to IPFS (should be running).

    ipfs add -r ./dist will give you a list of hashes for each file in the directory. We need the last one.

    Let's assume the root hash is QmbhqZ17mpsz9FrHyUhh3SmLURRLxVBpft94ya8njLgvBM.

  5. On the boot node, pin the last hash from the output above.

    ipfs pin add QmbhqZ17mpsz9FrHyUhh3SmLURRLxVBpft94ya8njLgvBM

3. Install go-ipfs from modified source.

The file we want to change is go-ipfs/core/corehttp/webui.go.

Grab the go-ipfs repository using go get.

go get -u -d github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs

Then,

cd ~/go/src/github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs

Now,

vi core/corehttp/webui.go

and change const WebUIPath:

const WebUIPath = "/ipfs/QmbhqZ17mpsz9FrHyUhh3SmLURRLxVBpft94ya8njLgvBM"

Now run make deps followed by make build.

The executable is written to ./cmd/ipfs/ipfs. Copy this file to /usr/local/bin/ipfs.
Now check it with which ipfs and ipfs version.

Location data will not work with a private swarm since geoip data is stored on the public IPFS filesystem. In order to enable location data of peers, you will have to upload geoip data to your swarm and modify the source of ipfs-geoip to point to the hashes of the uploaded data.