Read-only API

[jbenet]

Many use cases (eg. #1322) would love an exposed read-only API, in particular through the gateway.

We can do this a few different ways:

1. mount the readonly API on the normal Gateway endpoint (my preference) (easy)
2. create another, isolated endpoint for a readonly API. (medium)
3. implement auth on the API for writable commands, and open that up. (hard)

Regardless, when exposing these, we should expose:

• mainly read-only things that serve IPFS content {cat, ls, refs, block {get, stat}, object {get, stat, links}}
• maybe expose internal node service state (e.g. {stats, bitswap, dht, id})
• do not expose internal node variables (e.g. pins, keys, etc).

Short term goals

if we go with (1.) above, let's:

• setup gateway to expose pieces of the API
• expose {cat, ls, refs, block {get, stat}, object {get, stat, links}} via gateway

[harlantwood]

+1 for option 1.

[Kubuxu]

This is already resolved, isn't it? API is accessible under RO gateway localhost:8080.

[harlantwood]

Yup, should be closed I believe.