Astrawiki CLI

This is a command-line interface to manage an astrawiki node. It runs a background service to help pin articles and offers tools for creating, updating, and reading wiki content — either locally or via Docker.

Motivation

The main purpose of this tool is to be able to easily spin up a collaborator node for a wiki. By providing a reasonably straightforward way for a community to contribute to their wiki, anyone with access to a terminal can support the community they choose.

Features

• Create a new wiki and pin its articles for all to access.
• Connect with any existing wiki and help host it by pinning all its articles.
• Run it in the background as a service.

Prerequisites

Users should be familiar with port forwarding to open the needed ports for other peers to get the articles. It's recommended, but not necessary, that the user is familiar with IPFS and specifically OrbitDB.

Dependencies

• npm: for the installation.

Install

This tool comes packaged as a Node.js binary, but it also comes with its own Docker container.

Local

To install it locally, run:

npm install -g @bitxenia/astrawiki-cli

And then run astrawiki -V to check the installation was successful.

Docker

There's a DockerHub Docker image available. To get the image, run:

docker pull bitxenia/astrawiki-cli:latest

Ports

For the tool to work as intended, it's necessary to open the ports TCP 40001 and UDP 40001 to your machine. This is the same for containers and local installs, and enables the IPFS node to communicate with other peers.

Quick start

npm install -g @bitxenia/astrawiki-cli
# Starts your wiki given the name an your public IP
astrawiki start --wikiName "my-wiki" --ip "<your-ip>"

# Adds an article to the wiki
astrawiki add "An article" "/path/to/your/article/content"

# Print the article content
astrawiki get "An article"

Usage

CLI

Start the service

astrawiki start [flags]

This command starts the service and connects to the network with other astrawiki nodes.

Add an article

astrawiki add <name> [file]

Adds an article to the wiki given the name of the article. The file argument lets the user choose a file to be the article's content. If file isn't present, the tool lets the user write the content of the article from within an editor. The editor of choice depends on the $EDITOR variable.

Get an article

astrawiki get <name>

Prints out an article from the wiki, as long as it exists.

List all articles

astrawiki list

Lists all articles in the wiki as a newline separated list.

View logs

astrawiki logs

This command shows the current standard output of the service. To view the errors, run:

astrawiki logs -e

Also, you can follow the logs with the -f flag. This acts like tail -f.

Container

Start the service

To start the service, run the following:

docker run -p 40001:40001 -p 40001:40001/udp \
  -e ASTRAWIKI_WIKI_NAME="bitxenia-wiki" \
  -e ASTRAWIKI_PUBLIC_IP="0.0.0.0" \
  -e ASTRAWIKI_IS_COLLABORATOR="" \
  bitxenia/astrawiki-cli:latest

Make sure to replace the ASTRAWIKI_PUBLIC_IP environment variable to your actual IPv4 address.

Add an article

cat ./some-file.txt | docker exec -i astrawiki astrawiki add "An article" -

This has to be done through stdin, because passing a path or editing in-place is unsupported.

Get an article

docker exec -i astrawiki astrawiki get "An article"

List all articles

docker exec -i astrawiki astrawiki list

View logs

docker exec -i astrawiki astrawiki logs

Or, to view errors:

docker exec -i astrawiki astrawiki logs -e

HTTP API

There's a REST API that's in development, but it still works both in the local and the Docker versions after running astrawiki start.

Available at http://localhost:31337, and supports the following endpoints:

Add an article

POST /articles

This accepts the following body:

{
  "name": "<name of the article>",
  "content": "<content of the article as a raw string>"
}

On success, the server returns a 201 Created status code.

Get an article

GET /articles/<name>

This returns the following body:

{
  "name": "<name of the article>",
  "content": "<content of the article as a raw string>"
}

On success, the server returns a 200 OK status code.

List all articles

GET /articles

This returns the following body:

{
  "articles": [
    "article1",
    "article2"
    // ...
  ]
}

On success, the server returns a 200 OK status code.

Get server status

GET /

This returns a 200 OK if the server is running.

Configuration

Flags can handle the configuration, but the user can also set a config file to reuse the same configuration upon start.

Path of the config file:

~/.config/astrawiki-cli/config.json

It consists of a JSON file with all the configurations needed.

Example structure

{
  "wikiName": "<name of the wiki to open>",
  "publicIp": "<ipv4 address, must be public>",
  "isCollaborator": true
}

The priority of configuration values is the following:

1. Flags
2. Config file
3. Defaults

Note that the IP value is mandatory and doesn't have a default value.

Collaborating

Setting the --collaborator flag when starting the service will pin all the articles of the wiki you chose. But what does this mean?

Since IPFS is a decentralized service, it needs users hosting the content as opposed to servers. If you want to help your favorite wiki, it's useful to pin the articles. This means that anytime another user wants to access the wiki, they can get the content from you, or any other collaborator. That is, as long as you keep the service running in your machine.

Development

To work on this you can follow these steps:

git clone git@github.com:bitxenia/astrawiki-cli.git
cd astrawiki-cli
npm install
npm run build

This installs the dependencies and builds the JS files.

Testing

Please make sure you don't have the npm package installed globally first. Just in case, you can run:

npm remove -g @bitxenia/astrawiki-cli

To test the tool locally, you can run:

npm link

This creates a symlink to the built binary, allowing you to run it from anywhere using the astrawiki command.

Limitations

• It doesn't support astrawiki-eth.

Contributing

Feel free to contribute by adding PRs, commenting, or creating issues.

License

MIT (LICENSE-MIT / http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)