ipfs-grpc-client

ipfs-grpc-client

A client for the ipfs-grpc-server module

This module implements part of the IPFS Core API using gRPC over websockets to achieve the bidirectional streaming necessary to have full duplex streams running in the browser.

It's not recommended you use this directly, instead use the ipfs-client to combine this with the ipfs-http-client in order to have HTTP fallback for the missing parts of the API.

Why?

The fetch and XHR APIs do not allow for full-duplex streaming, that is, allowing the client to receive bytes from the response while also adding more bytes to the outgoing request.

This limits what we can do in browsers in terms of the API, for example streaming arbitrarily sized payloads or exposing libp2p duplex streams.

gPRC over websockets has no such limitations so allows us to harness the full power of a remote IPFS node in the browser without the need to work around browser behaviour.

Install

$ npm install ipfs-grpc-client

API

createClient([options])

Parameters

None

Options

An optional object which may have the following keys:

Name	Type	Default	Description
url	Multiaddr or string or URL	undefined	The address of a ipfs-grpc-server to connect to
agent	http.Agent	undefined	A http.Agent used to control HTTP client behaviour (node.js only)

Returns

Type	Description
object	An instance of the client

Example

const createClient = require('ipfs-gprc-client')

const client = createClient({
  url: '/ipv4/127.0.0.1/tcp/1234/ws'
})

const id = await client.id()