Background

Currently ipfs-check is limited to supporting Bitswap checks. It would be useful to add support for other transfer protocols that are already prolific, e.g. transport-ipfs-gateway-http, for which there are many providers in the IPNI.

Part of this should include allowing users in the UI to choose which protocols to test as part of the check.

Checking HTTP providers

As discussed in #70,

If we want to probe HTTP, we can make trustless gateway HEAD request with Accept: application/vnd.ipld.raw and ?format=raw
https://specs.ipfs.tech/http-gateways/path-gateway/#only-if-cached-head-behavior

Challenges

existing interfaces

We currently rely on the FindProvidersAsync(context.Context, cid.Cid, int) <-chan peer.AddrInfo method to handle getting providers from both the IPNI and the DHT concurrently. The challenge is that we don't have protocol information in that channel. We will likely need a helper method to convert the iterator from the Routing V1 client into a channel that returns results (rather than
peer.AddrInfo) so that we can rely on the same concurrency primitives while having the protocol information.

Problems with transport-ipfs-gateway-http providers

Let's take the example you gave of the CID: bafybeigdyrzt5sfp7udm7hu76uh7y26nf3efuylqabf3oclgtqy55fbzdi.

It has two providers with the "transport-ipfs-gateway-http" protocol:

[
    {
      "Addrs": [
        "/ip4/212.6.53.27/tcp/80/http"
      ],
      "ID": "12D3KooWHEzPJNmo4shWendFFrxDNttYf8DW4eLC7M2JzuXHC1hE",
      "Protocols": [
        "transport-ipfs-gateway-http"
      ],
      "Schema": "peer",
      "transport-ipfs-gateway-http": "oBIA"
    },
    {
      "Addrs": [
        "/ip4/212.6.53.28/tcp/80/http"
      ],
      "ID": "12D3KooWJ8YAF6DiRxrzcxoeUVjSANYxyxU55ruFgNvQB4EHibpG",
      "Protocols": [
        "transport-ipfs-gateway-http"
      ],
      "Schema": "peer",
      "transport-ipfs-gateway-http": "oBIA"
  } 
]

A couple of problems with this one specifically:

• It's only HTTP. No TLS, so not usable in the browser.
• Even over HTTP, it doesn't fully implement the trustless gateway protocol, e.g. HEAD requests are not allowed:

$ http HEAD http://212.6.53.28/ipfs/bafybeigdyrzt5sfp7udm7hu76uh7y26nf3efuylqabf3oclgtqy55fbzdi "Accept: application/vnd.ipld.raw"

HTTP/1.1 405 Method Not Allowed
Allow: GET
Content-Length: 18
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
Date: Wed, 02 Oct 2024 11:14:49 GMT
Vary: Origin
Vary: Accept-Encoding

A deeper investigation revealed that this is a Boost server, which uses frisbii as its gateway server which doesn't support HEAD only-if-cached requests. I have opened an issue for that.

• cc Protocol stewardship and improvements — IPFS/2025 ipshipyard/roadmaps#16
• cc Native HTTP across the IPFS Stack, to enable Filecoin direct retrieval — IPFS/2025 ipshipyard/roadmaps#9