Pins missing in new 2.12 version

Describe the bug The “pins” section is missing in the new 2.12.1 version. pins are also not visible.

To Reproduce

• You can navigate to /ipns/dev.webui.ipfs.io/#/files (it’s empty even though I have things pinned)
• You can change the url to /ipns/dev.webui.ipfs.io/#/pins it works, but still no local pins show up.

Expected behavior My local pins should show up.

Screenshots

Desktop:

• OS: Linux
• Browser: Firefox, Opera

Additional context Multiple pins should exist… but the webui is empty

[LucSalommez]

Hello, I just want to share my feedback as well. I use a distant node to store files programmatically (sent by my computer for exemple).

It is a lot easier for me to check the state of my IPFS node and to manage it through the webui. This is why I connect to the webui of my distant node and want to be able to remove files and pins from there.

On my local dev tests, I use http://127.0.0.1:5001/ipfs/bafybeif4zkmu7qdhkpf3pnhwxipylqleof7rl6ojbe7mq3fzogz6m4xk3i/#/files

Where I have all my pins available from a section displayed in the UI. When using the WebUI of my distant node however, the feature is removed. My pins are inaccessible from the UI.

This feature is in my opinion very useful to a lot of people and removing it does not make the tool any more accessible, quite the opposite actually.

Without @kallisti5 complaining and @lidel 's answer I would have never known I can still access this page using #/pins. Having to come up to this place and read every comment to find a way is pretty tricky to say the least.

Can you consider making pins accessible on the UI again please ?

[lidel]

(originally posted on matrix, reposting here for discoverability)

Files now show pin indicator column on Files screen.

The dedicated screen for listing low level local pins got removed from WebUI to reduce confusion, as low level pins were never designed to be exposed to GUI users, it is something you use on servers with huge datasets. Everything in MFS (Files) is already protected from local GC and enables you to assign human-readable names to CIDS, which is a better experience for Desktop/GUI users than a wall of nameless CIDs.

I personally have 1k of low level nameless pins, and it is impossible to make any meaningful decision as a desktop user by that point. I won’t have time to inspect 1k of my local pins and decide which one I want to keep or not. I just keep them around at this point. But If I used MFS from the beginning, then I would have meaningful dir/filenames that would make cleanup easy.

That is why we v2.12 makes Files (MFS) the preferred way to keep things around by regular users, and will move more of our GUIs in that direction.

PS. ipfs pin ls lists all indirectly pinned blocks, that is too much. What you want is to only list roots of recursive pins: ipfs pin ls --type=recursive

If you have some old local pins around and really want to manage them via Files screen, you can do one time import to MFS via this one-liner:

ipfs files mkdir /old_local_pins && for cid in $(ipfs pin ls --type=recursive -q); do ipfs files cp /ipfs/$cid /old_local_pins/$cid; done