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Networking Fundamentals in Bacalhau

Bacalhau uses libp2p under the hood to communicate with other nodes on the network.

Peer identity​

Because bacalhau is built using libp2p, the concept of peer identity is used to identify nodes on the network.

When you start a bacalhau node using bacalhau serve, it will look for an RSA private key in the ~/.bacalhau directory. If it doesn't find one, it will generate a new one and save it there.

You can override the directory where the private key is stored using the BACALHAU_PATH environment variable.

Private keys are named after the port used for the libp2p connection which defaults to 1235. By default when first starting a node, the private key will be stored in ~/.bacalhau/private_key.1235.

The peer identity is derived from the private key and is used to identify the node on the network. You can get the peer identity of a node by running bacalhau id:

bacalhau id

Configure peers​

By default, running bacalhau serve will connect to the following nodes (which are the default bootstrap nodes run by Protocol labs):

/ip4/35.245.115.191/tcp/1235/p2p/QmdZQ7ZbhnvWY1J12XYKGHApJ6aufKyLNSvf8jZBrBaAVL
/ip4/35.245.61.251/tcp/1235/p2p/QmXaXu9N5GNetatsvwnTfQqNtSeKAD6uCmarbh3LMRYAcF
/ip4/35.245.251.239/tcp/1235/p2p/QmYgxZiySj3MRkwLSL4X2MF5F9f2PMhAE3LV49XkfNL1o3

Bacalhau uses libp2p multiaddresses to identify nodes on the network.

If you want to connect to other nodes, and you know their Peer IDs you can use the --peer flag to specify additional peers to connect to (comma-separated list).

bacalhau serve \
  --peer /ip4/35.245.115.191/tcp/1235/p2p/QmdZQ7ZbhnvWY1J12XYKGHApJ6aufKyLNSvf8jZBrBaAVL,/ip4/35.245.61.251/tcp/1235/p2p/QmXaXu9N5GNetatsvwnTfQqNtSeKAD6uCmarbh3LMRYAcF

If you want to connect to a requester node, and you know it's IP but not it's Peer ID, you can use the following which will contact the requester API directly and ask for the current Peer ID instead.

bacalhau serve \
  --peer /ip4/35.245.115.191/tcp/1234/http

libp2p swarm port​

The default port the libp2p swarm listens on is 1235.

You can configure the swarm port using the --port flag:

bacalhau serve \
  --port 1235

To ensure that the node can communicate with other nodes on the network, make sure the swarm port is open and accessible by other nodes.

REST API port​

The Bacalhau node exposes a REST API that can be used to query the node for information.

The default port the REST API listens on is 1234.

The default network interface the REST API listens on is 0.0.0.0.

You can configure the REST API port using the --api-port flag:

You can also configure which network interface the REST API will bind to using the --host flag:

bacalhau serve \
  --api-port 1234 \
  --host 127.0.0.1
tip

You can use the --host flag to restrict network access to the REST API.

Generic Endpoint​

You can call http://dashboard.bacalhau.org:1000/api/v1/run with the POST body as a JSON serialized spec

curl -XPOST -d '{"Engine": "Docker", "Docker": {"Image": "ubuntu", "Entrypoint": ["echo"], "Parameters": ["hello"]}, "Deal": {"Concurrency": 1}, "Verifier": "Noop", "PublisherSpec":{"Type":"IPFS"}}' 'http://dashboard.bacalhau.org:1000/api/v1/run';

Once you run the command above, you'll get a CID output:

"cid": "QmeNhAA97qtdGHQtd1Qvgk13C6GHkn6aTCT8ih53JLN7vL"