CoreApi.Offline

[magik6k]

Mentioned in #5649 (comment), it would be nice to have a way to tell CoreAPI that we want to be in offline mode.

There are a few ways to do this:

• Context hints - [RFC] Add an offline hint to contexts #4009
  • Should be quite contained
  • Easy to implement global --offline flag
• api.Offline()
  • Should also be quite contained
  • Easy to implement global --offline flag too
  • More visible?
• Functional options on the constructor
  • Also not a bad option, should be decently small change
  • Also easy to implement --offline

We could also use this to expose sessions (and maybe other global options later?), so I'd say we should go with the more flexible option, which would be context hints

Opinions?

cc @Stebalien

[dokterbob]

Trying to add large (150GB+) resources with a running daemon breaks for us (ipfs-search.com). Probably because the daemon crashes during the process.

I might share these resources using ipfs-pack. But due to the large resources required by an IPFS daemon, I would strongly prefer to only run one, and there's already one running on our server (eating about 10GB RAM with about 8k connections).

Hence, it would be ideal to be able to add these resources independently of the running (and regularly crashing, due to it hitting hard memory limits) and then adding them as a one-off operation. Hence, being able to do ipfs add as if there were no daemon running.

[Stebalien]

@dokterbob I believe you're looking for the poorly documented ipfs --local add flag. This issue is about an offline option such that ipfs get ... doesn't use bitswap (although it will likely also imply --local).

[dokterbob]

Poorly or not documented? Where might I find info on this one?

[Stebalien]

ipfs --help will list the global options (including --local).