Decentralized Durability Engine

The Archivist project aims to create a decentralized durability engine that allows persisting data in p2p networks. In other words, it allows storing files and data with predictable durability guarantees for later retrieval.

WARNING: This project is under active development and is considered pre-alpha.

Build and Run

Prerequisites

The following should be installed before building the node:

• Nim 2.2.4
• Cmake 3.x
• Rust 1.79.0
• Optional: NodeJS 22.x, only required for some tests

Windows

Building in windows requires the following additional setup:

• install Mingw64, e.g. in C:\mingw64
  • download the release-posix-seh-uct variant from the release page, and unzip to e.g. C:\mingw64
  • create a symbolic link from mingw32-make.exe to make.exe, e.g:
    • cd C:\mingw64\bin
    • ln -s mingw32-make.exe make.exe
• install Msys2, e.g. in C:\msys64
• setup Nim to use mingw for building
  • When following the Nim installation instructions, ensure that finish.exe does not download mingw. It should use the mingw that you just installed yourself instead.
• setup Rust to use mingw for building
  • rustup install stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
  • rustup default stable-x86_64-pc-windows-gnu
• setup PATH
  • ensure that your mingw folder occurs before the msys2 folder, e.g: C:\mingw64\bin;C:\msys64\usr\bin
  • if you have WSL installed, ensure that the WSL binaries occur after the mingw and msys2 folders, e.g: C:\mingw64\bin;C:\msys64\usr\bin;%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps
  • if you have WSL installed and your C:\Windows\System32 contains bash.exe you're on an old version of WSL and the Archivist build will not work until it is uninstalled

Note: the commands in the rest of this document should be executed in powershell or cmd, not in an msys shell.

Build

To build the project, clone it and run:

nimble build

The executable will be placed under the build directory under the project root.

Run

Run the node with:

build/archivist

Configuration

It is possible to configure an Archivist node in several ways:

1. CLI options
2. Environment variables
3. Configuration file

The order of priority is the same as above: CLI options --> Environment variables --> Configuration file.

API

The node exposes a REST API that can be used to interact with it. Overview of the API.

Contributing and development

Feel free to dive in, contributions are welcomed! Open an issue or submit PRs.

Linting and formatting

We use nph for formatting our code and it is required to adhere to its styling. In order to format files run nimble format. If you are using VSCode and the NimLang extension you can enable "Format On Save" (eq. the nim.formatOnSave property) that will format the files using nph.