w3up-cli 🆙

w3up-cli is a command-line interface for the w3up platform by DAG House. You can use the CLI to do things like generate an identity, register, upload assets, list your uploads, and more!

w3up is currently a preview feature for the web3.storage platform, and will eventually replace its current upload product. Registering and uploading data to w3up is currently free. Additionally, accounts registered during this preview window will be integrated with the broader web3.storage platform's account system. However, data uploaded during this preview window will eventually require payment for us to continue storing it and making it available.

By using w3up, you consent to the web3.storage terms-of-service. Please refer to the web3.storage website for information on pricing. If you do not intend to pay, please do not use w3up for long-term storage. (The exception is if you are uploading NFT data, in which case we will migrate your data and account to NFT.Storage which offers free storage of NFTs.)

Please reach out to the #web3-storage channel on IPFS Discord if you have any questions!

🏠 Homepage

Installation

Install from NPM:

npm install -g @bitruss/w3up-cli
npm install -g @web3-storage/w3up-cli

Usage

Running the w3up command with no arguments will show an overview of the Quickstart flow, which you'll want to follow when you're first getting set up.

Quickstart

The "Quickstart" flow is outlined when you run w3up without giving it a command:

w3up

You should see something like the following:

Quickstart:
1. Generate Your identity
	- w3up id 			Create an id
	- w3up register <email> 	Register
2. Upload to W3 Up
	- w3up upload <filename> 	Upload a file or directory
3. Verify
	- w3up list 			View your upload

w3up

Options:
  --version  Show version number                                       [boolean]
  --help     Show help                                                 [boolean]export-settings

To complete the quickstart flow, you'll need to use a few commands:

1. w3up id generates a new identity keypair.
2. w3up register associates your email address with your new identity key and grants access to the service.
3. w3up upload uploads files and directories.
4. w3up list shows information about your uploads.

Commands

This section covers the most important commands available in w3up. For a complete list, run w3up --help.

w3up --help

An example of the current output is shown below, but please note that we're rapidly improving w3up, and there may be some delay between changes in the code and updates to this README. If you notice that they have diverged before we do, please open an issue and let us know!

Quickstart:
1. Generate Your identity
	 - w3up id 			 Create an id
	 - w3up register <email> 	 Register
2. Upload to W3 Up
	 - w3up upload <filename> 	 Upload a file or directory
3. Verify
	 - w3up list 			 View your upload

w3up

Commands:
  w3up id                  Generate a UCAN Identity
  w3up register <email>    Register your UCAN Identity with w3up
  w3up whoami              Show your current UCAN Identity
  w3up list                List your uploads                                                                     [aliases: uploads]
  w3up upload <path>       Upload any file or directory to your account
  w3up upload-cars <path>  Walk a file directory, and upload any found cars to an account
  w3up open <cid>          Open a CID in your browser on w3s.link
  w3up settings <cmd>      Manage settings
  w3up store <cmd>         Manage car files in w3up.
  w3up uploads <cmd>       Manage uploads
  w3up delegate <cmd>      Manage delegations
  w3up car <cmd>           CAR file specific commands
  w3up info                Print information about cli

Global:
  -p, --profile Select profile configuration identifier.                                                 [string] [default: "main"]

Options:
      --version  Show version number                                                                                      [boolean]
      --help     Show help                                                                                                [boolean]

Docs:
  https://github.com/web3-storage/w3up-cli

Registration

Most of the commands in w3up require a registered identity keypair.

Registration is a two-step process:

1. w3up id generates a new identity keypair.
2. w3up register associates the identity key with your email address.

Once registered, you can verify that your identity has been registered using w3up whoami, which displays the id for your w3up account.

id

Displays your identity keypair, creating it if it does not yet exist.

w3up id

On first run, generates the public and private key pairs necessary to work with the underlying UCAN authorization system.

Running w3up id a second time will load your key from disk instead of generating a new one.

You can validate you are registered!

If you have generated the id properly, you'll see your did:key printed in the command line. It should look like did:bafy.....

register

Registers your identity with the w3up service.

w3up register you@example.com

After you've generated an identity, you need to register it with the w3up service. The w3up register command will display a message asking you to check your email. Once you click the activation link in the email, the w3up register command will complete the registration process and show a success message.

Note: Remember to check your spam folder if you suspect you never got the email

whoami

Displays the identifier for your w3up account.

w3up whoami

The whoami command displays an identifier for your w3up account. Note that this may differ from your identity key in cases where you have registered multiple identities to the same account.

General Usage

After creating your identity and registering with w3up, you should be able to start using the service. The main commands you'll use are:

1. w3up upload
2. w3up list
3. [w3up upload remove](#upload remove)

upload

Uploads a file or directory and links it to your account.

w3up upload <filename>

Important: All data uploaded using w3up is made available to anyone who requests it using the correct CID. Do not upload sensitive or private data in unencrypted form!

The example below uploads a file named test.txt containing the text hello world:

w3up upload test.txt

You should see something like this:

✔ Succeeded uploading bagbaieraq7mqnbxwetsl53fs776rcink4ar6ow5u5imrb3di6klochw2fdfq with 200: OK
roots:
 bafybeig3v73gypy3wshzjdq6aopisk66hjdwdma4cg6q7eojiuhivorkyi

Notice that there are two CIDs printed in the output. The first CID identifies the Content Archive (CAR) that w3up generates when preparing your files for upload.

A CAR is a collection of content-addressed data "blocks", with one or more "root blocks" that contain data and/or links to other blocks. In the output above, there's a single root block with the CID bafybeig3v73gypy3wshzjdq6aopisk66hjdwdma4cg6q7eojiuhivorkyi. This root CID is what you want to use when retrieving data from IPFS. For example, to fetch the file from the HTTP gateway at w3s.link, you would use the URL https://w3s.link/ipfs/bafybeig3v73gypy3wshzjdq6aopisk66hjdwdma4cg6q7eojiuhivorkyi

📝 If you are uploading thousands of small files, it's faster to put them together into a directory and upload that, than to invoke this CLI with thousands of individual files.

upload-cars

Bulk upload a collection of CAR files (content archives) containing IPLD data.

The upload command described above accepts regular files and directories and packs them into a Content Archive (CAR) before uploading to the web3.storage platform. If you already have your data in CAR format, of if you'd rather do the CAR conversion yourself, you can use the upload-cars command.

w3up upload-cars <path>

The path argument must point to a directory containing one or more CAR files OR a single car file. If there are nested directories, each will be recursively walked and all discovered CAR files will be uploaded.

list (same as uploads list)

Prints a list of CIDs for all files uploaded thus far.

w3up list

You should see something similar to this:

✔ Listing Uploads...
Date         Data CID
--------     --------
10/23/2022   bafybeia3btd7atvtolzanvj3jm6aftgwyvbix5i653ibvqtpb3hzvgagie
10/23/2022   bafybeia5rtlmap55es6e4yq26eope3yq5pebh3brsdoozqtcde37x7ixb4
10/23/2022   bafybeif3zdwoudgy3qu24mt7qqau4xvt476q3h75vi7lkujyst33ii3mnu

This lists the "root" or content CIDs associated with your account. use the --verbose flag to also see the car CID that contains the content.

If you want a "machine readable" format, use the --stdout flag to get plaintext tab seperated.

w3up upload remove <cid>

This will dis-associate an uploaded asset from your account. If you run w3up list after unlinking a file, you should not see it in the list. If you want to re-associate the file with your account, use w3up upload and re-upload the file. In situations when a file has been previously uploaded, the upload command will not need to actually upload the file, it will just relink it.

Important: w3up remove does not delete your data from the public IPFS network, Filecoin, or other decentralized storage systems used by w3up. Data that has been removed and is not linked to any other accounts may eventually be deleted from the internal storage systems used by the w3up service, but there are no guarantees about when (or whether) that will occur, and you should not depend on data being permanently deleted.

CAR file commands

When using w3up upload, your files are packed into a Content Archive (CAR), which efficiently stores content-addressed blocks of data. In some cases, you may want to upload CARs directly, skipping the automatic conversion. For example, you may want to bulk-convert a large dataset into CAR format before upload to preserve a local backup of your data in CAR format.

w3up provides some commands for creating and working with CAR files. For more, see the guide to working with Content Archives in the Web3.Storage docs.

car generate

Encodes a file or directory to CAR format.

The car generate command accepts a path to a file or directory and creates a CAR file that can be uploaded with upload-cars.

w3up car generate test.txt

✔ CAR created test.txt => bagbaieraq7mqnbxwetsl53fs776rcink4ar6ow5u5imrb3di6klochw2fdfq.car
roots:
 bafybeig3v73gypy3wshzjdq6aopisk66hjdwdma4cg6q7eojiuhivorkyi

As with the upload command, two CIDs are printed in the generate-car output. The first CID is for the CAR file itself, while the root CID identifies the content within the CAR. Use the root CID when requesting content from IPFS, e.g. with ipfs get or from an HTTP gateway.

car inspect

Print the CID of all blocks in a CAR file.

The car inspect command takes the path to a CAR file and prints the CID of each block contained in the CAR.

w3up car inspect test.car

CIDv1								                                        CIDv0
bafybeicg2rebjoofv4kbyovkw7af3rpiitvnl6i7ckcywaq6xjcxnc2mby	zQmT78zSuBmuS4z925WZfrqQ1qHaJ56DQaTfyMUF7F8ff5o
bafybeig3v73gypy3wshzjdq6aopisk66hjdwdma4cg6q7eojiuhivorkyi	zQmd8DcmhjnfSBMLM7f9q3puvFuUgBjHiXeVZNHWh5ZWwjX

Note that each CID is printed twice, once in the current CID version 1 format, and once in the deprecated "v0" format. We strongly recommend using CIDv1 wherever possible, but the v0 CID may be useful for integration with existing systems.

You can also see the tree structure of the CAR file by passing in the --tree flag to car inspect:

w3up car inspect --tree test.car

roots
└─┬ bafybeig3v73gypy3wshzjdq6aopisk66hjdwdma4cg6q7eojiuhivorkyi
  └── test.txt

Finally, passing the --dot flag will output a description of the graph structure using the DOT language defined by the Graphviz project, to allow visually inspecting the CAR structure.

Delegate capabilities

Once you have an identity registered with w3up, you can delegate capabilities to other agents.

w3up delegate to <did>

Delegate capabilities to an agent did.

w3up delegate to did:12345...
✔ Wrote delegation to delegation.txt

A delegation.txt file is generated with the UCAN delegation provided to the other agent with did did:12345....

w3up delegate import <fileName> [alias]

Import a UCAN delegation file to access capabilities delegated by other agent

w3up import-delegation delegation.txt delegator
✔ Imported delegation for delegator did:key:z6M... from delegation.txt successfully.

Once a delegation.txt is imported, you can switch to the account delegated:

w3up delegate switch [alias]

w3up delegate switch delegator
✔ now using account: did:key:z6M...

If no alias is passed, a menu appears allowing you to choose the delegation.

w3up delegate list

selected   alias      did
--------   --------   --------
*          self       did:key:z6MkiL...
           delegator  did:key:z6MkiB...

Settings management

There are a few commands for working with your settings.

Settings are stored in a binary configuration file in a w3up folder inside the default configuration location for your platform.

Rather than work with the binary settings file directly, it's convenient to use the import-settings and export-settings commands, which convert the binary format to JSON.

settings export [filename]

Exports your account settings to a file named settings.json in the current directory.

Important: this file contains your private identity key and must be kept in a secure location!

settings import [filename]

Loads account settings from a settings.json file in the current directory.

settings reset

Deletes your account settings.

Important: this command completely removes the binary configuration file containing your identity key from your local machine. If you have not exported your settings, you will lose access to the identity and will need to generate and register a new one.

Other commands

uploads or upload list

Does the same as list

uploads remove <cid>

Removes a logical upload (content CID) from your account while keeping the car in w3up.

insights

The w3up service offers "insights" about uploaded content that can be retreived using one of the following commands:

• w3up insights
• w3up insights-ws

w3up insights <cid>

w3up insights <cid> will hit the w3up service and retrieve all currently known insights for that CID.

The w3up insights-ws is similar, but will set up a websockets-based watch and print any further insights as they are discovered.

About Content Archives (CARs)

Under the hood, w3up always uploads data in the form of Content ARchives, or CARs. The CAR format allows efficiently transmitting a collection of content-addressed blocks of data.

If you're using the upload command, this should be relatively transparent, although you may notice that the command output shows the CID of the CAR as well as the CID of the content. If you're uploading CARs directly, you may also want to use the w3up commands for working with CAR files.

You can find more information about working with CAR files in the guide to working with CARs in the Web3.Storage docs.

Run tests

yarn run test

🤝 Contributing

Contributions, issues and feature requests are welcome!
Feel free to check issues page.

📝 License

This project is Apache--2.0 licensed.