API sugar: start, listen, and connect

Doing user-land apps and modules on top of IPFS, there are some oddities that I would love to see addressed to make life easier to developers.

One of them is starting a node, also related to offline support:

Creating a node and starting it should be easy to achieve even if offline. Starting a node should not mean initialising the network stack. It just means that you have a node you can read and write DAG nodes to and from. Also, it should mean that all the APIs are available. For instance, after starting, the pubsub API should be ready, even if subscriptions are only effective if the node is connected.

I would like to be able to do:

const node = IPFS()
await node.start() // initialises repo, makes all the APIs ready for commands

// pubsub is available
await node.pubsub.subscribe('topic', handler)

// can listen on a protocol (like webrtc) or an address (like a websockets server)
await node.listen(address, options) // listens on an address / protocol

// try to connect to a specific node
try {
  const duplexStream = await node.connect(peerAddress, protocol)
} catch (err) {
  if (err.code === 'ECONNECT') {
    console.log('could not connect to ' + peerAddress)
  }
}

// stops node and all network activity
await node.stop()

ipfs / js-ipfs

API sugar: start, listen, and connect #1084