Replicator
Replicator is an experiment that attempts to build an interactive notebook similar to observablehq, where notebooks are distributed as self contained bundle on IPFS network.
Vision
Back when I started writing JS it was lot of fun, there were no complicated
tools, no configurations no compilation just a little bit of discipline on
sharing the global namespace. You could write some code, put it on the
server and everyone could run it given a URL.
With JS modules supported natively in all modern runtimes and IPFS we
don't need to worry about global namespace nor a server to host our modules,
we can just type the code in browser, run it, save it on IPFS network and share
CID (hash based content identifier) so anyone could use it! And because IPFS
is content addressable deduplication is free and smarter runtimes could cache
libraries to reduce amount networking needed.
Design Overview
Notebook amis to be web-native, which is why it uses native JS modules instead of bundlers. However there are a lot of JS libraries that make enables building this with much less effort, which is why project root installs them as node dependencies which are then compiled into ES modules via esbuild and written into application source tree.
Deployment
It is assumed that you have ipfs in your path and initialized repo, in which
case running yarn release will produce output like:
$ ipfs add --cid-version=1 --quieter --recursive ./replicator
bafybeidrwvc3jhfccu4qup6a6a7hye446tl3csx3wyt2azzmmmmagexti4
That is it you can take that CID and access deployed version either over local IPFS gateway like http://localhost:8081/ipfs/bafybeidrwvc3jhfccu4qup6a6a7hye446tl3csx3wyt2azzmmmmagexti4 or one of the public gateways like https://dweb.link/ipfs/bafybeidrwvc3jhfccu4qup6a6a7hye446tl3csx3wyt2azzmmmmagexti4
Known Issues
Turns out esbuild in some edge cases does not handle browser substitutions in package.json. Following issues & pull requests
were created to get that resoved. In the meantime git URLs are used
to workaround this in the meantime
- evanw/esbuild#740
- libp2p/js-libp2p-websockets#120
- bcoin-org/bcrypto#58
- es-shims/globalThis#17
- Node globals polyfilled in
./src/node-globals.js