20201220 | Release 0.12.0

IPFS Cluster 0.12.0 is here! It comes with the new ipfs-cluster-follow application, a super-easy way of launching a “follower” peer.

Follower cluster peers join clusters to participate in the replication and distribution of IPFS content, but do not have permissions to modify the Cluster peerset or perform actions on other peers of the Cluster. When running ipfs-cluster-follow, peers are automatically configured with a template configuration fetched through IPFS (or any HTTP url) and run with some follower-optimized parameters. Additionally, ipfs-cluster-follow can setup and run multiple peers in parallel, so users can subscribe to several clusters at the same time.

Would you like to try it out? Grab ipfs-cluster-follow and run:

./ipfs-cluster-follow ipfs-websites init ipfs-websites.collab.ipfscluster.io
./ipfs-cluster-follow ipfs-websites run

Your IPFS daemon will start pinning a list of IPFS-related websites (you will need about 600MB of available space). You can stop and re-start your followers any time and they will catch up to the latest state of things.

We have also added a bunch of new features. Pins can now have expiration times so that they are automatically unpinned at some point. And Cluster operators can now use the Cluster-GC command to trigger garbage collections on all the managed IPFS daemons. These should be very useful for IPFS storage providers.

Finally, users running clusters behind NATs or in Dockerized environments will benefit from improvements in NAT traversal and connectivity. Cluster peers now support the new libp2p QUIC transport and TLS handshake.

You can read more information about all the new things for this release in the changelog.

We hope the possibilities opened by this new release will make IPFS Cluster a very useful tool for hosting and re-distributing IPFS data in a collaborative manner, building communities around archives based on user interests and strenghthening content distribution in the IPFS network by doing so.