Lotus is an experimental implementation of the Filecoin Distributed Storage Network. For more details about Filecoin, check out the [Filecoin Spec](https://github.com/filecoin-project/specs).
All work is tracked via issues. An attempt at keeping an up-to-date view on remaining work is in the [lotus testnet github project board](https://github.com/filecoin-project/lotus/projects/1).
[You can copy `lotus` and `lotus-storage-miner` to your `$GOPATH/bin` or `$PATH`, or reference all lotus commands below from your local build directory with `./lotus`]
(CID is short for Content Identifier, a self describing content address used throughout the IPFS ecosystem. It is a cryptographic hash that uniquely maps to the data and verifies it has not changed.)
### Make a deal
(It is possible for a Client to make a deal with a Miner on the same lotus Node.)
For example `$ lotus client deal bafkre...qvtjsi t0111 36000 12` proposes a deal to store CID `bafkre...qvtjsi` with miner `t0111` at price `36000` for a duration of `12` blocks.
### Search & Retrieval
If you've stored data with a miner in the network, you can search for it by CID:
As an alternative to the CLI you can use Pond, a graphical testbed for lotus. It can be used to spin up nodes, connect them in a given topology, start them mining, and observe how they function over time.
- Click `[Spawn Storage Miner]` to start mining (make sure the Node's wallet has funds).
- Click on `[Client]` to open the Node's client interface and propose a deal with an existing Miner. If successful you'll see a payment channel open up with that Miner.
> Note: Don't leave Pond unattended for long periods of time (10h+), the web-ui tends to
* If that didn't help, open a new issue, ask in the [Community Forum](https://discuss.filecoin.io) or reach out via [Community chat](https://github.com/filecoin-project/community#chat).
Lotus is architected modularly, and aims to keep clean API boundaries between everything, even if they are in the same process. Notably, the 'lotus full node' software, and the 'lotus storage miner' software are two separate programs.
The lotus storage miner is intended to be run on the machine that manages a single storage miner instance, and is meant to communicate with the full node via the websockets jsonrpc api for all of its chain interaction needs. This way, a mining operation may easily run one or many storage miners, connected to one or many full node instances.
The systems API is defined in here. The RPC maps directly to the API defined here using the JSON RPC package in `lib/jsonrpc`. Initial API documentation in [docs/API.md](docs/API.md).
The block producer logic. This package interfaces with the full node through the API, despite currently being implemented in the same process (very likely to be extracted as its own separate process in the near future).
The storage miner logic. This package also interfaces with the full node through a subset of the api. This code is used to implement the `lotus-storage-miner` process.
Pond is a graphical testbed for lotus. It can be used to spin up nodes, connect them in a given topology, start them mining, and observe how they function over time.
Lotus has tracing built into many of its internals. To view the traces, first download jaeger](https://www.jaegertracing.io/download/) (Choose the 'all-in-one' binary). Then run it somewhere, start up the lotus daemon, and open up localhost:16686 in your browser.