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decentralized-identity / dwn-user-guide

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DWN Community Node User Guide

This will get you up to speed with the basics of working with Decentralized Web Nodes (DWNs) and DIF's DWN Community Node, powered by TBD and Google Cloud. This includes a minimal CLI project and additional guidance to get you started. dwn_community_node

Introduction

A DWN is a decentralized personal and application data storage and message relay node. Users may have multiple nodes that replicate their data between them.

DWNs provide the following benefits:

DWNs follow an open standard; see the DIF Decentralized Web Node specification. DIF plays a vital role in addressing these challenges through standardization and education, paving the way for a future Web where privacy and data sovereignty are paramount.

About the DIF DWN Community Node

TBD and Google Cloud have partnered to enable DIF’s DWN Community Node. The goal is to make it easy for builders to get started with next generation web infrastructure.

The Community Node is a reliable sandbox for staging, pre-production, or testing -- not production use.

You can connect to the Community Node easily by passing the endpoint when calling Web5.connect(), as shown below.

Basic CLI Tutorial

About

For simplicity, this sample uses TBD's @web/api package, which handles the details of interacting with DWNs. Because this conforms to the DWN spec, you may use a different library or write your own to interact with DWNs.

By default, the @web5/api package connects to TBD's DWN instance. You can configure this code to connect to other instances, such as your own self-hosted instance or DIF's Community Node.

We'll start with a basic DWN command line example, which will use the default (TBD's) DWN node, and then update it to use DIF's Community Node.

Install

git clone https://github.com/decentralized-identity/dwn-cli-sample.git
cd dwn-cli-sample
npm install
npm run build

Commands

Examples

Create a DID

./bin/run.js create-did

Output will look like:

Created DID: did:dht:43ffbao7fxkhofcxpody87dz74cp5ynx8bsed4iudtzqk7gimewy

Write to the DWN

 ./bin/run.js store-data "hello world"

Output will look like:

Record ID: bafyreih4rqmu4jztwoews26onwda3y7p4gfguevke2cxhvtvmul73bl4v4

List the records in the DWN

./bin/run.js all-data

Output will look like:

==============Document list==========
1. bafyreih4rqmu4jztwoews26onwda3y7p4gfguevke2cxhvtvmul73bl4v4

Retrieve a DWN record by record ID

./bin/run.js retrieve-data bafyreih4rqmu4jztwoews26onwda3y7p4gfguevke2cxhvtvmul73bl4v4

Output will look like:

============Record Data=================
Author: did:dht:43ffbao7fxkhofcxpody87dz74cp5ynx8bsed4iudtzqk7gimewy
Content: hello world

The DIF Community Node

Connecting

To connect to the community node, simply pass https://dwn.gcda.xyz to the dwnEndpoints array as shown below:

const {did, web5} = await Web5.connect({
  didCreateOptions: {
    dwnEndpoints: ['https://dwn.gcda.xyz'], // User provides google's community DWN instance
  },
  registration: {
    onSuccess: () => {
      // Registration succeeded, set a local storage value to indicate the user is registered and registration does not need to occur again.
    },
    onFailure: (error) => {
      // Registration failed, display an error message to the user, and pass in the registration object again to retry next time the user connects.
    },
  },
})

Limits & Terms of Use

Running your own DWN server

By default, when you call Web5.connect() it will use the bootstrap DWN nodes included which allow people to reach you via your DID.

You may want to run a DWN server just for you, or as a public service for you and your friends and family. DWNs can be as simple as a docker image or a node process running somewhere.

DWN-servers can run anywhere you can run node.js or docker. http and websocket need to be available to the DWN server. See below for some suggestions.

For additional details about configuration settings for privacy, data storage, and network connectivity, see TBD's recommendations.

Running on render.com

You can run an instance on the render.com service:

Running with ngrok

You can run a DWN-server on your local machine or home server and expose it to the internet using ngrok.

First, install ngrok

Then run:

  docker run -p 3000:3000 -v myvolume:/dwn-server/data ghcr.io/tbd54566975/dwn-server:main

  ## in another terminal:
  ngrok http 3000

Running with cloudflared

Cloudflare has a tunnel service that you can use to expose your DWN server to the internet, if you run it on a server at home. With cloudflared installed, run the following commands:

  git clone https://github.com/TBD54566975/dwn-server.git
  cd dwn-server
  npm install
  npm run server

  ## in another terminal:

  cloudflared tunnel --url http://localhost:3000

Community and Support

Additional Resources