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open-services / open-registry-website

Website source for https://open-registry.dev
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Include bolivar on landing page #3

Open victorb opened 5 years ago

victorb commented 5 years ago

Currently Bolivar is not mentioned at all in the landing page. We should at least have a link to bolivar but probably should include installation + usage as well, together with the normal centralized registry way that exists now.

kbariotis commented 5 years ago

@victorb how does Bolivar fits in the bigger picture? I understand that the proxy (which is hosted in this repo is using IPFS to cache the packages from the NPM Registry. What does Bolivar do?

victorb commented 5 years ago

Bolivars purpose is to move the registry closer to you and enable local-network sharing of modules. It's not needed to run Open-Registry, but allows faster access and lower costs (in terms of internet vs local bandwidth).

So on every request to metadata/a tarball to Open-Registry, the proxy caches it to IPFS in one big directory. The hash of this directory is then used in Bolivar to resolve the hash of the metadata/tarball, so all data goes over libp2p. This means that the data can be fetched from another Bolivar instance if found, or Open-Registry libp2p node if needed. If it doesn't exists, it'll request the data over normal HTTP transport.

victorb commented 5 years ago

Thinking about it more, we need to frame both installation options in two different ways, as they serve two different use cases really. But haven't really figured out how to put it clearly.