How to bundle webui with companion and desktop?

[lidel]

We want to ship Web UI with both Companion and Desktop.
Goal: speed and ensuring it works in offline environments.

Some options I see:

• (A) build it from source every time
  • Slows down the build of Companion/Desktop
  • Prone to errors (different builds of the same webui revision, harder to debug)
• (B) Use prebuilt artifact and download it during the build of Companion/Desktop.
  • (B1) from npm (requires publishing to npm)
  • (B2) from IPFS (may be easier, could be automated to the point of being transparent, eg. setup Jenkins so it builds every revision and adds it to IPFS)
• (C) Do not bundle any data, open it from IPFS address (like go-ipfs)
  • The problem is offline mode. It could be solved if we get go-ipfs to ship with specific CIDs being preloaded, which could remove the need of bundling it with Companion and Desktop at a cost of increasing size of go-ipfs.

Related Work

• Ship the new WebUI ipfs-companion#590

[hacdias]

@lidel I'd go preferably for B. Either B1 or B2 would work well, although B1 would be simpler to bundle. For B2, we'd need a way to know the latest revision and download it on build time.

[lidel]

B1 is a little bit easier for consumers, but every update would require a new npm release.
B2 may be easier, because it does not require release and... is already done 💃

@olizilla mentioned today that Jenkins already builds it to update http://webui.ipfs.io
So I checked Jenkins and its all there. We can just copy CID from logs at:

• https://ci.ipfs.team/job/IPFS%20Shipyard/job/ipfs-webui/job/master/lastSuccessfulBuild/console

Scroll down to:

New website: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qmar7PEjn6YMw1VyYztdfGBELHCFqVz8yK2n5ycrXftP82

To keep things simple, for now we could just curl it in our build scripts to download compressed ~7MB archive (uncompressed is ~24MB):

curl -s "https://ipfs.io/api/v0/get?arg=/ipfs/Qmar7PEjn6YMw1VyYztdfGBELHCFqVz8yK2n5ycrXftP82&archive=true&compress=true" > webui.tar.gz

[hacdias]

@lidel don't forget that, for Desktop, we need a cross-platform script (that does work on Windows when building so using curl and tar -xvf aren't options).

I can do a Node script to fetch data from:

https://ci.ipfs.team/job/IPFS%20Shipyard/job/ipfs-webui/job/master/lastSuccessfulBuild/consoleText

Then, find the correct line and download it. Not as easy as it would be with a shell script, but doable

[hacdias]

And I wonder how much stable is the public API right now. I just tried to download it multiple times and it always failed: the speed started decreasing to 0 after downloading 1/2 MB.

And how's it possible to be 24 MB? Isn't that oversized? Source maps!

[lidel]

I went with B2 for now and created some orchestration for fetching prebuilt webui from IPFS + fallback to HTTP:

• Ship the new WebUI ipfs-companion#590 (comment)

[hacdias]

I think this is an ended discussion for now :)