github.com/sahib/brig

A smaller release with some bug fixes and a few new features. Also one bigger stability and speed improvement. Thanks to everyone that gave feedback!

Fixed

• Fix two badger db related crashes that lead to a crash in the daemon. One was related to having nested transactions, the one was related to having an open iterator while committing data to the database.
• Fix some dependencies that led to errors for some users (thanks @vasket)
• The gateway code now tries to reconnect the websocket whenever it was closed due to bad connectivity or similar issues. This led to a state where files were only updated after reloading the page.
• Several smaller fixes in the remotes view, i.e. the owner name was displayed wrong and most of the settings could not be set outside the test environment. Also the diff output was different in the UI and brig diff.
• We now error out early if e.g. »brig ls« was issued, but there is no repo. Before it tried to start a daemon and waited a long time before timing out.
• Made »brig mkdir« always prefix a »/« to a path which would lead to funny issues otherwise.

Added

• Add a --offline flag to the following subcommands: cat, tar, mount and fstab add. These flags will only output files that are locally cached and will not cause timeouts therefore. Trying other files will result in an error.
• »brig show« now outputs if a file/directory is locally cached. This is not the same as pinned, since you can pin a file but it might not be cached yet.
• Make the gateway host all of its JavaScript, fonts and CSS code itself by baking it into the binary. This will enable people running the gateway in environments where no internet connection is available to reach the CDN used before.
• Add the possibility to copy the fingerprint in the UI via a button click. Before the fingerprint was shown over two lines which made copying tricky.
• A PKGBUILD for ArchLinux was added, which builds brig from the develop branch. Thanks @vasket!

Changed

• The brig remote ls command no longer does active I/O between nodes to check if a node is authenticated. Instead it relies on info from the peer server which can apply better caching. The peer server is also able to use information from dials and requests to/from other peers to update the ping information.
• Switch the internal checksum algorithm to blake2s-256 from sha3-256. This change was made for speed reasons and leads to a slightly different looking checksum format in the command line output. This change MIGHT lead to incompatibilities.
• Also swap scrypt with argon2 for key derivation and lower the hashing settings until acceptable performance was achieved.
• Replace the Makefile with a magefile, i.e. a build script written in Go only which has no dependencies and can bootstrap itself.
• Include IPFS config output in »brig bug«.

Removed

• The old Makefile was removed and replaced with a Go only solution.

It's only been a few months since the last release (December 2018), but there are a ton of new features / general changes that total in about 15k added lines of code. The biggest changes are definitely refactoring IPFS into its own process and providing a nice UI written in Elm. But those are just two of the biggest ones, see the full list below.

As always, brig is always looking for contributors. Anything from feedback to pull requests is greatly appreciated.

Fixed

• Many documentation fixes and updates.
• Gateway: Prefer server cipher suites over client's choice.
• Gateway: Make sure to enable timeouts.
• Bugfix in catfs that could lead to truncated file streams.

• Lower the memory hunger of BadgerDB.
• Fix a bug that stopped badger transactions when they got too big.

Added

• The IPFS daemon does not live in the brig process itself anymore. It can now use any existing / running IPFS daemon. If ipfs is not installed, it will download a local copy and setup a repository in the default place. Notice that this is a completely backwards-incompatible change.

• New UI: The Gateway feature was greatly extended and an UI was developed that exposes many features in an easily usable way to people that are used to a Dropbox like interface. See here for some screenshots of the UI and documentation on how to set it up. The gateway supports users with different roles (admin, editor, collaborator, viewer, link-only) and also supports logging as anonymous user (not by default!). You can also limit what users can see which folders.

• New event subsystems. This enables users to receive updates in "realtime" from other remotes. This is built on top of the experimental pubsub feature of IPFS and thus needs a daemon that was started with --enable-pubsub-experiment. Users can decide to receive updates from a remote by issuing brig remote auto-update enable <remote name>. More details in the documentation.

• Change the way pinning works. brig will not unpin old versions anymore, but leave that to the repinning settings. This is an automatic process that will make sure to keep at least x versions, unpin all versions greater than y and make sure that only a certain filesystem quota is used.

• New trash subcommand that makes it easy to show deleted files (brig trash ls) and undelete them again (brig trash undelete <path>).

• New brig push command to ask a remote to sync with us. For this to work the remote needs to allow this to us via brig remote auto-push enable <remote name>. See also the documentation.

• New way to handle conflicts: embrace will always pick the version of the remote you are syncing with. This is especially useful if you are building an archival node where you can push changes to. See also the documentation. You can configure the conflict strategy now either globally, per remote or for a specific folder.

• Read only folders. Those are folders that can be shared with others, but when we synchronize with them, the folder is exempted from any modifications.

• Implement automated invocation of the garbage collector of IPFS. By default it is called once per hour and will clean up files that were unpinned. Note that this will also unpin files that are not owned by brig! If you don't want this, you should use a separate IPFS instance for brig.

• It's now possible to create .tar files that are filtered by certain patterns. This functionality is currently only exposed in the gateway, not in the command line.

• Easier debugging by having a pprof server open by default (until we consider the daemon to be stable enough to disable it by default). You can get a performance graph of the last 30s by issuing go tool pprof -web "http://localhost:$(brig d p)/debug/pprof/profile?seconds=30"

• One way install script to easily get a brig binary in seconds on your computer: bash <(curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sahib/brig/master/scripts/install.sh)

Changed

• Starting with this release we will provide pre-compiled binaries for the most common platforms on the release page.
• Introduce proper linting process (make lint)
• init will now set some IPFS config values that improve connectivity and performance of brig. You can disable this via --no-ipfs-optimization.
• Disable pre-caching by default due to extreme slow-ness.
• Migrate to go mod since we do not need to deal with gx packages anymore.
• There is no (broken) make install target anymore. Simply do make and sudo cp brig /usr/local/bin or wherever you want to put it.

Removed

• A lot of old code that was there to support running IPFS inside the daemon process. As a side effect, brig is now much snappier.

Fixed

• Compression guessing is now using Go's http.DetectContentType()

Added

• New gateway subcommand and feature. Now files and directories can be easily shared to non-brig users via a normal webserver. Also includes easy https setup.

Changed

Removed

Deprecated

Fixed

All features mentioned in the documentation should work now.

Added

Many new features, including password management, partial diffs and partial syncing.

Changed

Many internal things. Too many to list in this early stage.

Removed

Nothing substantial.

Deprecated

Nothing.

Initial release on the Linux Info Day 2018 in Augsburg.