canvas-hub-daemon

TODO: Explain how proxying works

Deployment on fly.io

canvas-hub-daemon is currently configured to use fly.io as a hosting service. To deploy your own instance, firstly run the steps in "Initial setup" if a fly app does not exist, then the steps in "Deployment".

### Initial setup

If a fly.io app for canvas-hub-daemon does not already exist, run the following command:

fly launch --copy-config --no-deploy

When prompted, do not set up a PostgreSQL instance. Then run the following command to create a new volume - this will persistently store the app data, which will be mounted by the canvas-hub-daemon app when it is deployed:

fly volumes create data

Then run the following commands to allocate IP addresses for the canvas-hub-daemon:

fly ips allocate-v4
fly ips allocate-v6

Deployment

Once the initial setup is complete (or if you are updating an existing app), build the latest version of canvas-hub-daemon and deploy it to fly.io with the following commands:

npm run build
fly deploy

How to run canvas-hub-daemon locally

To run canvas-hub-daemon locally, run the following commands in the repository directory:

mkdir data  # Create a directory to store app data
npm install  # Install dependencies
npm run build  # Build the app source
npm run start  # Run the built app

This will start a daemon server running on http://127.0.0.1:8000 with the "proxy server" feature disabled. To change the port that the daemon is running on, set the PORT environment variable.

See the canvas-hub documentation for running canvas-hub locally alongside the daemon.

Checking blocks on Ethereum

By default, the daemon runs in unchecked mode, meaning that the block hashes sent in action and session messages will not be checked against the blockchain. To check blocks, set the ETH_CHAIN_ID environment variable to the id of an Ethereum chain (e.g. 1 for mainnet, 5 for göerli) and set the ETH_CHAIN_RPC environment variable to an RPC endpoint for the corresponding chain (these can be generated by signing up for a service like Infura or running your own Ethereum node).

Note: regarding private networking on fly.io

If you can't successfully ping6 canvas-hub-daemon.internal after joining the Wireguard VPN it's probably because your ISP doesn't support IPv6 and that's confusing macos into thinking it can't resolve v6 addresses even though it really can. You can dig canvas-hub-daemon.internal to resolve the instance's internal address and use that instead. The internal address changes between deployments.

% dig canvas-hub-daemon.internal aaaa +noall +answer

; <<>> DiG 9.10.6 <<>> canvas-hub-daemon.internal aaaa +noall +answer
;; global options: +cmd
canvas-hub-daemon.internal. 5	IN	AAAA	fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:7d17:3:911e:2
%
% ping6 fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:7d17:3:911e:2
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:8cfe:0:a:502 --> fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:7d17:3:911e:2
16 bytes from fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:7d17:3:911e:2, icmp_seq=0 hlim=62 time=86.032 ms
16 bytes from fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:7d17:3:911e:2, icmp_seq=1 hlim=62 time=84.655 ms
16 bytes from fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:7d17:3:911e:2, icmp_seq=2 hlim=62 time=81.929 ms
%
% curl 'http://[fdaa:0:ce3a:a7b:7d17:3:911e:2]:8000/app' -s | jq
{}