npm-on-ipfs: the desktop app! A long lived client to encourage co-hosting

Having teams co-host the modules they use would be rad! But that needs a long running process on the developers machine. We could have the npm-on-ipfs client spawn one, but it’s not very visible to the user, and the current expectation of the npm command is that it does its work and then exits, so there would be a UX challenge to alter that.

What if we had a menubar app like ipfs desktop that ran an ipfs daemon process to re-host modules you fetch? It could show you stats about what modules you use a lot, and which ones other folks have fetched from you.

Would this be valuable? Could it help us usher in the network effect of having many smaller, partial caches of popular npm modules available on the network?

[agentofuser]

Sorry to parachute into the conversation, but in my opinion it’s worth it considering integrating IPFS as a storage backend for Verdaccio, an open source npm registry/cache/proxy which has been gaining a lot of popularity.

It’s super easy to get started with, has a beautiful React-based UI on the way, and integrates seamlessly into regular npm/yarn/private-corporate-registry workflows.

The IPFS plugin could fork from the local-storage plugin, and I think it would be more familiar and low-energy to adopt than a dedicated solution.

If this isn’t the right place to suggest it I can open a separate issue and delete this one, np. (I have no affiliation to the project btw.)

[lidel]

My main fear is that adding another menubar app will just feel noisy and wasteful to users who also choose to install IPFS Desktop at some point.

Separate app adds unnecessary user confusion and maintenance burden of duplicated features such as auto-update, daemon orchestration: If I have both, do I have two daemons, or one? Which app is the owner of the daemon? Do we promote both apps at https://ipfs.io/#implementations ?

I believe we could design UX so that npm-on-ipfs detects IPFS Desktop and enables “NPM support” in it automatically. It should incentivize people to run a single IPFS node, not multiple ones.