I run IPFS desktop and also have the IPFS extension for Brave installed.
When I run the desktop application it works great. I’m connected and can see peers etc. Perfect.
When I launch Brave I can also see whats going on in the extension badge. The badge shows the number of peers and if I click the extension icon I can see the Gateway and API addresses.
When I click “My Node” in the extension menu and it opens the IPFS interface in the browser however, I get “Could not connect to the IPFS API”. If I go to the Status tab (still in the browser) and enter the API address (in my case default: http://127.0.0.1:5001), still no luck. I get an orange pop-up bar at the bottom of the screen: “Unable to connect to the provided IPFS API address”.
I’m sort of guessing this is because the desktop app is connected and only one interface can connect at a time. But at the same time it’s a little confusing. The extension is clearly receiving info from the Desktop app’s IPFS server, as it’s got a badge showing the number of peers. Why then can’t I control the Node via the web interface?
By the way my IPFS Node Type setting in the extension is “External”. I can set it to “Provided by Brave” and then I can access the web interface just fine… but of course that’s because this setting means I’m running a separate node in Brave and I’m not so sure that’s what I want to do.
I’d appreciate advice/ help with the following:
- (Why) isn’t it possible to have the web interface access the IPFS server running on my desktop?
- Are there any pros/cons to just running 2 nodes, one on the desktop app and one in Brave? (main disadvantage that I can imagine is that I’m duplicating data, at least if my nodes are also peers of one another, then they will likely share data, but from a network point of view that’s not particularly helpful considering both nodes are on the same device.)