tahoe-lafs/docs/running.rst

How To Run Tahoe-LAFS

Introduction

This is how to run a Tahoe-LAFS client or a complete Tahoe-LAFS grid. First you have to install the Tahoe-LAFS software, as documented in INSTALL.

The tahoe program in your virtualenv's bin directory is used to create, start, and stop nodes. Each node lives in a separate base directory, in which there is a configuration file named tahoe.cfg. Nodes read and write files within this base directory.

A grid consists of a set of storage nodes and client nodes running the Tahoe-LAFS code. There is also an introducer node that is responsible for getting the other nodes talking to each other.

If you're getting started we recommend you try connecting to the public test grid as you only need to create a client node. When you want to create your own grid you'll need to create the introducer and several initial storage nodes (see the note about small grids below).

Running a Client

To construct a client node, run “tahoe create-client”, which will create ~/.tahoe to be the node's base directory. Acquire the introducer.furl (see below if you are running your own introducer, or use the one from the TestGrid page), and paste it after introducer.furl = in the [client] section of ~/.tahoe/tahoe.cfg. Then use “tahoe run ~/.tahoe”. After that, the node should be off and running. The first thing it will do is connect to the introducer and get itself connected to all other nodes on the grid.

By default, “tahoe create-client” creates a client-only node, that does not offer its disk space to other nodes. To configure other behavior, use “tahoe create-node” or see configuration.

The “tahoe run” command above will run the node in the foreground. On Unix, you can run it in the background instead by using the “tahoe start” command. To stop a node started in this way, use “tahoe stop”. tahoe --help gives a summary of all commands.

Running a Server or Introducer

To build either a storage server node, or an introducer node, you'll need a way for clients to connect to it. The simplest case is when the computer is on the public internet (e.g. a "VPS" virtual private server, with a public IP address and a DNS hostname like example.net). See servers for help with more complex scenarios, using the --port and --location arguments.

To construct an introducer, create a new base directory for it (the name of the directory is up to you), cd into it, and run “tahoe create-introducer --hostname=example.net .” (but using the hostname of your VPS). Now run the introducer using “tahoe start .”. After it starts, it will write a file named introducer.furl into the private/ subdirectory of that base directory. This file contains the URL the other nodes must use in order to connect to this introducer. (Note that “tahoe run .” doesn't work for introducers, this is a known issue: #937.)

Storage servers are created the same way: tahoe create-node --hostname=HOSTNAME . from a new directory. You'll need to provide the introducer FURL (either as a --introducer= argument, or by editing the tahoe.cfg configuration file afterwards) to connect to the introducer of your choice.

See configuration for more details about how to configure Tahoe-LAFS.

A note about small grids

By default, Tahoe-LAFS ships with the configuration parameter shares.happy set to 7. If you are using Tahoe-LAFS on a grid with fewer than 7 storage nodes, this won't work well for you — none of your uploads will succeed. To fix this, see configuration to learn how to set shares.happy to a more suitable value for your grid.

Do Stuff With It

This is how to use your Tahoe-LAFS node.

The WUI

Point your web browser to http://127.0.0.1:3456 — which is the URL of the gateway running on your own local computer — to use your newly created node.

Create a new directory (with the button labelled “create a directory”). Your web browser will load the new directory. Now if you want to be able to come back to this directory later, you have to bookmark it, or otherwise save a copy of the URL. If you lose the URL to this directory, then you can never again come back to this directory.

The CLI

Prefer the command-line? Run “tahoe --help” (the same command-line tool that is used to start and stop nodes serves to navigate and use the decentralized filesystem). To get started, create a new directory and mark it as the 'tahoe:' alias by running “tahoe create-alias tahoe”. Once you've done that, you can do “tahoe ls tahoe:” and “tahoe cp LOCALFILE tahoe:foo.txt” to work with your filesystem. The Tahoe-LAFS CLI uses similar syntax to the well-known scp and rsync tools. See frontends/CLI for more details.

To backup a directory full of files and subdirectories, run “tahoe backup LOCALDIRECTORY tahoe:”. This will create a new LAFS subdirectory inside the “tahoe” LAFS directory named “Archive”, and inside “Archive”, it will create a new subdirectory whose name is the current date and time. That newly created subdirectory will be populated with a snapshot copy of all files and directories currently reachable from LOCALDIRECTORY. Then tahoe backup will make a link to that snapshot directory from the “tahoe” LAFS directory, and name the link “Latest”.

tahoe backup cleverly avoids uploading any files or directories that haven't changed, and it also cleverly deduplicates any files or directories that have identical contents to other files or directories that it has previously backed-up. This means that running tahoe backup is a nice incremental operation that backs up your files and directories efficiently, and if it gets interrupted (for example by a network outage, or by you rebooting your computer during the backup, or so on), it will resume right where it left off the next time you run tahoe backup.

See frontends/CLI for more information about the tahoe backup command, as well as other commands.

As with the WUI (and with all current interfaces to Tahoe-LAFS), you are responsible for remembering directory capabilities yourself. If you create a new directory and lose the capability to it, then you cannot access that directory ever again.

The SFTP and FTP frontends

You can access your Tahoe-LAFS grid via any SFTP or FTP client. See frontends/FTP-and-SFTP for how to set this up. On most Unix platforms, you can also use SFTP to plug Tahoe-LAFS into your computer's local filesystem via sshfs, but see the FAQ about performance problems.

The SftpFrontend page on the wiki has more information about using SFTP with Tahoe-LAFS.

The WAPI

Want to program your Tahoe-LAFS node to do your bidding? Easy! See frontends/webapi.

Socialize

You can chat with other users of and hackers of this software on the #tahoe-lafs IRC channel at irc.freenode.net, or on the tahoe-dev mailing list.

Complain

Bugs can be filed on the Tahoe-LAFS "Trac" instance, at https://tahoe-lafs.org/trac/ .

You can also "fork" the repo and submit Pull Requests on Github: https://github.com/tahoe-lafs/tahoe-lafs .