It took through the end of last month to get nodes moved from my workstation to other machines. As of the first I’ve been getting started on Verifi.
Thanks to @aatonnomicc for putting gas in the tank and keeping progress flowing. Thanks to @riddim and @neo for helping me in chat get up to speed with using the CLI tool. And thanks to everyone who’s contributed feedback in this topic.
Side note, I’m going to be trying out @storage_guy’s suggested language of “upload manifest” in lieu of “upload list”. Feedback welcome.
As I’ve been using ant I’ve learned more about how it and the network itself works. Uploaded files and dirs have their name saved with the upload, underscoring @neo’s question about metadata.
I’ve also been thinking about how to make Verifi easy to use.
A file upload, as of ant --version 0.3.2, produces output that looks like:
$ ./ant file upload -p verifi.txt
Logging to directory: “/home/born2build/.local/share/autonomi/client/logs/log_2025-01-06_20-16-16”
Connected to the Network Uploading data to network…
Uploading file: “verifi.txt”
Upload completed in 19.054738834s
Successfully uploaded: verifi.txt
At address: 2c63ed8ce9084faf5421f6f7941d2e8e31c12e01dde2cd76fa5ced8460c50678
Number of chunks uploaded: 8
Total cost: 15 AttoTokens
To register the verifi.txt upload with Verifi, I’d need to manually follow the upload with running shasum -a 512 verifi.txt which produces the output:
b2df3ff9c921c7ee49f3966d0e523ddc92d6034f1b15ecb9863e2f367ddccb8a2bb150ace8d6bc883afa12716a42f48e4acd1dbcadc159420d8018c8ad1c8be9 verifi.txt
I’d then need to combine that hash with the upload address (2c63ed8ce9084faf5421f6f7941d2e8e31c12e01dde2cd76fa5ced8460c50678) as well as its file name (verifi.txt) metadata.
So I’ve come up with an idea that I think improves on that. First, move the verification functionality into a check subcommand. (I could use verify however I think verifi verify ... looks redundant) Next, add a register subcommand with a command-line argument specifying the path of a manifest file. The register subcommand could use ant file upload output piped to it to automatically calculate the hash and add it to the upload manifest file.
The multistep manual process would become:
$ ./ant file upload -p verifi.txt | verifi register -m uploads.txt
The output of ant file upload would be passed through to the user, so nothing’s hidden, but it would also be scanned by verifi register. Upon successful upload, the file name and address would be taken from the output, used to calculate the hash as well as file name metadata, and automatically appended to uploads.txt.
Verification could then be run with verifi check uploads.txt.
What do you think? How could I make that better?