getting peerId (or peerInfo) instance in transport

[pgte]

Currently, the libp2p transport and discovery modules config accepts instances or classes. Inside the transport constructor call I need access to the peerInfo instance. Could this be done inside the constructor call ?

[jacobheun]

The transport interface currently doesn't take peerInfo as an argument for the constructor. Are you using a custom transport? I'm curious what the use case is to see if updating the interface would be useful.

Since the peerInfo needs to be known for libp2p instance creation, you can currently work around this by passing that to a new transport instance and then using the transport instance during libp2p configuration. Does this approach create problems for you?

[pgte]

@jacobheun yes, I'm using a custom transport that wraps another transport, see here.

What workaround were you proposing?

[jacobheun]

Okay, so you're doing what I was talking about where you are initializing websocketstar, but it looks like that becomes seemingly impossible to do through the ipfs abstraction.

I feel like the right thing to do here is to have js-ipfs allow for custom libp2p generators to be added via configuration. It currently allows for providing a repo instance, but libp2p would need some of the info from initialization. So being able to provide a libp2p generator function instead of configuration feels like that could make things easier for developers to be able to customize libp2p to their needs.

This would allow you to do something like this:

  const ipfs = new IPFS({
    libp2p: (_ipfs) => {
      return new Libp2p({
        peerInfo: _ipfs._peerInfo,
        peerBook: _ipfs._peerInfoBook,
        config: { /*custom config*/ }
      })
    }
  })

@pgte would this make things easier for you and does it make sense?
@alanshaw what do you think about this approach?

[pgte]

@jacobheun that would help if we the generator somehow gets a peerId like you showed.

[jacobheun]

I've got an open PR for this support, ipfs/js-ipfs#1470. I included a working example of configuration as well, that shows creating a transport with the ipfs nodes peerId

[jacobheun]

Support for this was released in js-ipfs@0.32.0