Textile Buckets

Buckets is a Textile product that provides storage to be used in a very similar fashion as standard cloud storage, but using IPFS and Filecoin under the hood.

Here are the steps to quickly get setup with buckets:

1. Download and install the hub CLI:

   The installation process is documented here (opens new window). You will need to grab the latest release from the releases page (opens new window).

2. Initialize the account and login:

   hub init # Follow instructions
   ...
   hub login # if you already have a username
   

   Detailed instructions can be found in the official docs (opens new window).

3. Initialize a new Bucket:

   Buckets are mapped to local directories. In order to create a bucket from the working directory run:

   cd /path/to/your/data
   hub bucket init
   

   WARNING

   Buckets are not encrypted by default. If you are going to store sensitive data, use the hub bucket init --private option. Read more here (opens new window).

   It is also possible to retrieve existing buckets (or pull changes performed by others in the case of shared buckets) with the hub bucket init --existing flag.

4. Make changes and push them:

   After adding or modifying files in your bucket folder, you can publish the changes by pushing them:

   hub bucket status # show changes to the bucket
   hub bucket push   # publish changes to IPFS
   

5. Explore your content on IPFS:

   Your content has been pushed and is made available on IPFS. You can display thread, IPNS and website links associated to your bucket with:

   hub bucket links
   

   The first link should take you to the Hub gateway and allow you to inspect your files as currently published. You can use the IPNS link for example, if you are hosting a website, to open it on the browser.

6. Archive your bucket and back it up on Filecoin:

   You can archive your bucket at any point and store it on Filecoin:

   # Archive
   hub bucket archive
   # Check status
   hub bucket archive status
   # Or watch status
   hub bucket archive status -w
   

7. Learn more about Textile buckets:

   • All hub commands and subcommands take a --help flag that displays available flags and usage instructions. These are also published here (opens new window).
   • The instructions here are based on the Buckets guide (opens new window), which contains more details, for example about permissions (opens new window), shared buckets and organizations.
   • Filecoin storage in Textile buckets is a very new feature! Make sure you read the Bucket Archiving (opens new window) for the latest information on how it works, limits and price.
   • This blog post (opens new window) contains explanatory videos and information about archiving and recovery. Once you have a deal CID, you can also use Lotus to retrieve the data (opens new window).

8. Use the Buckets API directly:

• js-textile (opens new window) provides programmatic access to the Buckets API from Javascript. Some examples are here (opens new window).
• Go support is also available (opens new window).