README.md

Gaia Reader Side-car

This module implements an HTTP GET endpoint for data stored with Gaia via the local disk driver. This is necessary since unlike other cloud-based storage systems, local disks do not have built-in HTTP servers.

How To Build

To build, run:

$ npm install
$ npm run build

To install, run:

$ sudo npm install # or, `sudo npm link`

This should install blockstack-gaia-reader to your $PATH.

How To Use

To use, first create a configuration file that indiciates (1) what port to bind on, and (2) where to load the files the Gaia hub stored. Example:

JSON

$ cat /etc/gaia-reader.conf
{
   "port": 4001,
   "diskSettings": {
      "storageRootDirectory": "/var/gaia/disk"
   }
}

TOML

$ cat /etc/gaia-reader.conf
port = 4001

[diskSettings]
storageRootDirectory = "/var/gaia/disk"

Then, run the Gaia hub reader with the config file:

$ blockstack-gaia-reader /etc/gaia-reader.conf

It will begin serving files out of the directory indicated in storageRootDirectory, and will listen on the given port.

Deployment Notes

The Gaia read side-car needs to service GET requests on URLs that start with your Gaia hub's read URL. You can determine your Gaia hub's read URL by either looking for the readURL key in your Gaia hub's config file, or by looking for the read_url_prefix field in the data returned by a GET /hub_info on your Gaia hub.

We recommend running an nginx proxy in front of the reader side-car, in order to do things like rate-limiting and SSL termination. If you do this, make sure that nginx services requests on your Gaia hub's expected read URL.