Testing Harness for Large IPFS Networks

[JGAntunes]

Hey everyone!

Sorry if this isn't the best place to ask this (point me in the right direction if it isn't so). I'm looking for a way to spin up and instrument a large test net of IPFS nodes. Some of my requirements are:

• Spin up js-ipfs nodes in nodejs
• Spin up js-ipfs nodes in a browser like env (like phatom JS or puppeteer)
• Interact with these nodes, run commands and applications at each node
• Simulate some kind of network disturbance (e.g. by making a node idle, closing connections, etc.)
• Extract metrics such as bandwidth, RAM, CPU and disk used

I've found out a couple of projects such as:

• https://github.com/whyrusleeping/iptb
• https://github.com/ipfs/test-lab
• https://github.com/ipfs/kubernetes-ipfs

But all of them either look like a WIP or only cater for go-ipfs. Is there something out there that could help me achieve this?

[dryajov]

Hi @JGAntunes!

Spin up js-ipfs nodes in nodejs
Spin up js-ipfs nodes in a browser like env (like phatom JS or puppeteer)
Interact with these nodes, run commands and applications at each node

This are possible with https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfsd-ctl. This is a tool that allows spawning go, js and proc (running in the same process as ipfsd-ctl) nodes, it also allows doing that from browser environments. It uses ipfs-api to communicate with the spawned nodes.

As for your other point, I'm not entirely sure, but my understanding is that they are go centric at this point - don't quote me on that tho, others will surely have more insight.

// cc @victorbjelkholm @diasdavid @lgierth

[JGAntunes]

Hey @dryajov!

I wasn't considering js-ipfsd-ctl but might be useful, thanks for the feedback!

Yeah, AFAIK all the other solutions look fairly go-centric and the test-lab looks to be in early stages still. After speaking with @diasdavid he pointed me out to some other possibilities like http://mininet.org/ and https://github.com/MetaMask/mesh-testing. I'll be looking into this for the following weeks and will try to leave feedback here as soon as I can 👍