MFS and IPNS update

Is there a way to automatically publish and update the MFS root on IPNS? Maybe it already does that and I’m just not aware of that. If now it seems like it would be something nice to have. Using MFS to automatically update links is nice but the root CID would still change after each mutation.

I do not know of any built-in functionality to do this, but it should be fairly simple to write a script that gets the CID of the MFS root and publishes it to an IPNS address, and just automatically executing it with cron/systemd.

Like said you could probably use a cron to do something like that

ipfs name  publish --key=my-mfs `ipfs files stat /|head -n1`

It’s true that it would be nice to link keys and folders. This way the daemon could track changes and republish whenever there is a change.

Thanks for the suggestion, sounds like something to try.

To me this has always been the elephant in the room: how can you call IPFS a shared filesystem at all, without this feature. Until then, it’s more of a P2P hash-based sharing system, like bittorrent with a dht. But if the IPNS record were always up-to-date (subject to propagation delays between systems), pointing to the latest snapshot of what has been written to the file tree, then suddenly you do really have a filesystem, like a shared drive. (assuming you can also mount it remotely, with fuse or so) So I think it should be prioritized to get the ipfs daemon to do that for us.

Thank you for the feedback.

I was also thinking that you could publish DNSLink updates using something like designate from openstack https://docs.openstack.org/designate/latest/