Table of Contents

Bootstrap 🤝

The application serves as a bootstrap node, providing an HTTP endpoint to distribute known peers to new peers joining the network. This setup ensures seamless peer discovery and initialization, enabling efficient and secure distributed data exchange within the peer network. By containerizing the application using Docker, deployment becomes significantly easier and makes quick VPS deployments easy. Additionally, the user control panel offers finer-grained controls over the network, including scaling and monitoring, which enhances the manageability and reliability of the peer network infrastructure.

Initialization

The P2PBootstrap project initializes by setting up the necessary configurations and services required for the bootstrap server to operate. The main entry point is the Program.cs file, which configures the application and starts the web server.

  1. Configuration: The application reads configuration settings from the appsettings.json file. This includes settings for encryption key directory, primary key names, database path, and other essential configurations. In order to ease the deployment process for containerized instances, all configuration settings in the configuration file appsettings.json have an environmental variable equivalent that can be used. In order to tell the application to use these, the environmental variable CONTAINERIZED_ENVIRONMENT must be set to to true. In the table below, you can see each configuration key alongside its corresponding environment variable name and a brief description of its purpose.
AppSettings Key Environment Variable Description
Configuration:KeysDirectory KEYS_DIRECTORY Specifies the directory where encryption keys are stored.
Configuration:BootstrapMode BOOTSTRAP_MODE Determines whether the bootstrap server runs in Authority or Trustless mode.
Configuration:AuthorityKey:PublicKey PUBLIC_KEY_PATH The filename (or path, relative to the base directory) for the public key used by the bootstrap server.
Configuration:AuthorityKey:PrivateKey PRIVATE_KEY_PATH The filename (or path) for the private key used by the bootstrap server.
Configuration:NetworkName NETWORK_NAME The identifier for the P2P network, used to distinguish this network from others.
Configuration:OptionalEndpoints:PublicIP ENDPOINT_PUBLICIP Server will serve a GET endpoint/api/Bootstrap/publicip which can be used by clients to retrieve their public face IPv4 address
Database:DbFileName DB_FILENAME The filename for the local database file storing bootstrap server data.

When running in a containerized environment, the configuration management first attempts to retrieve these values from their respective environment variables (e.g., "KEYS_DIRECTORY" for the keys folder). If an environment variable isn't set, it falls back to the values specified in appsettings.json. This design allows for flexible configuration management during deployment, especially in environments like Docker containers where runtime settings might differ from development.

This side-by-side mapping ensures that you can maintain consistent configuration across different deployment scenarios with minimal code changes.

  1. Logging: Logging is handled using the ConsoleDebugger package.
  2. Web Server Setup: The application uses ASP.NET Core to set up the web server. It configures the HTTP request pipeline, enabling default files, static files, and routing. This is an AOT compatible application, as is most of the P2PNet library.

Operation

The P2PBootstrap project operates by providing several key functionalities:

  1. Peer Distribution: The bootstrap server provides an HTTP endpoint (/api/Bootstrap/peers) to distribute the list of known peers to new peers joining the network. This endpoint can operate in two modes:
    • Trustless Mode: Returns the list of known peers directly.
    • Authority Mode: Requires the client to receive and store a public key from the bootstrap server before returning the peer list.
  2. Admin Terminal Integration: The server integrates an admin terminal to easily execute commands.
  3. Encryption Service: The server initializes an encryption service to handle secure communication. This includes generating and loading PGP keys, generating new keys, clear signing messages, generating hashes of objects, and more.
  4. Database Initialization: The server initializes a local database to store necessary data. It ensures the database directory exists and sets up the required files.

User Control Panel

The user control panel provides a web-based interface for managing the bootstrap server. In this web-based interface is a terminal for executing commands. It includes the following pages for easier management as well:

  1. Overview: Displays an overview of the server's status and key metrics.
  2. Settings: Allows users to modify server settings, such as encryption keys and database paths.
  3. Peers: Displays the list of known peers and provides options to perform actions on them, such as disconnecting or blocking peers.

Overview

To supplement the information visually, the following diagrams are provided:

  1. Bootstrap Server Architecture: Shows a broad architecture of the bootstrap server.
  2. Endpoints: Illustrates the flow of endpoints, from initial request to response.

bootstrap chart

Note: Bootstrap server still under construction 🏗️