Ed: Hello, and welcome. In this tutorial, we are going to talk about local IPFS node. Now, local IPFS node might be just enough for you to keep your files in IPFS and prevent them from being deleted by Garbage Collector. If your laptop or computer is constantly offline, or if you're cautious about your disk space, then remote pinning service might be a better option for you. As for remote pinning service, you have two options. Option one is to set up one yourself, though this option requires you a little bit of ingenuity. Option two is going with the commercial one. Now, as for commercial option, you have multiple commercial options available in the market today, like Infura, Pinata or any other. In this tutorial though, we are going to teach you how to set up your local node yourself. You will be able to add and pin the files, and also you'll be able to read them by using gateway. Intrigued? Let's get started. So to start your local IPFS node, you have two options. One, you can download the desktop application, and option two, you can use NPM package in order to start it. Now, for this tutorial, we'll use the latter option. We also have prepared a small application which will allow you to interact with this newly created and started local IPFS node. Let's check out what this application actually does. So once you open your application, you will see quite a few files here. First, let's check out what package dot JSON file has. If you check the dependencies, you will see that we have three dependencies that this project uses. One of them is called IPFS.

So IPFS dependency is the one which allows us to start our local IPFS node. Another one is called IPFS HTTP client. So this is the dependency that lets you to interact with this newly created IPFS node. And then another called dotenv just allows us to configure local environments. Now, if you look at the script, here, we also have a script that's called 'Start' which actually starts the script called 'Upload to IPFS dot js.' We will talk about that script in a few seconds. But before that, let's check what we are planning to upload to IPFS today. If you open the res folder and check where we have an NFTs folder and click on one of the images, you will be greeted by our grumpy cat called Happy. So we will be uploading five pictures of our cat Happy into our local, locally started IPFS node. Now, let's see where the actual magic is happening. If we open our upload to IPFS dot js file, here, you will see around 100 lines of code. Now, at the top of the file, you'll have the configuration file. So here, you will be allowed to actually point to the different IPFS node. In our case, we will be pointing to locally created one, but if you want, you can point to the remote pinning service or you can, you know, point to the commercial ones. So this is where this is configured. Then, if you look further, you will see that we have a couple of methods. So the first method is the one that allows you to actually upload all the images from the res folder to IPFS. So this first method actually goes and reads the images from this res NFTs folder.

In our case, it's our cat Happy, and it will upload all of them into IPFS. And once it's done, it will go and create a JSON for each of these files uploaded. And the JSON actually is just a small file that holds the name of the file, image URL and a short description. Once we're done with that, the script will actually go and upload that JSON NFT metadata into the IPFS as well. So this second method is nearly identical to the first one, but it just doesn't create any additional JSON files anymore. Right? And then at the end of file, you just have a few helper methods. And that's it. This is very, very simple application. Now, let's actually go and try to start our first IPFS local node. In order to do that, we will have to run a small command. So the command will look something like that. We will call NPX and we will call JS IPFS and type in 'Daemon.' Let's click 'Enter.' You will see some console log statements getting printed out in a console until you will be greeted with a nice message called 'Daemon is ready.' That means that our local IPFS node is actually successfully started. Now, in order to upload Happy into this node, we need to run another command. If we open a new terminal window and if we type 'NPM start,' click enter. You will straight away see a few different lines of console logs getting-, a few different lines of logs printed out. Let's check at the first, first line. Here, you have an-, a URL on which, if you click, the new browser window will be opened.

If you click on any of the files that you see in this table, you will be greeted with the grumpy cat called Happy. Now, you can go and try this out yourself. So you just learned how to set up your local IPFS node. You also learned how to add them and retrieve files from it. Now it's time to get your hands dirty.

How to setup your local IPFS Node?