Running IPFS on Chromebooks

Assuming you have your Chromebook running in developer mode and have access to a shell, and that you have Chromebrew installed, getting up and running with IPFS only takes a couple of steps.

Install via Chromebrew

crew install ipfs

Init

ipfs init

This will create an .ipfs folder in the /home/chronos/user folder.

I moved this to /usr/local/.config/.ipfs and did ln -s /usr/local/.config/.ipfs .ipfs to keep everything under /usr/local.

Run IPFS Daemon

ipfs daemon &

You’ve got IPFS running in the background now!

Connect to the Fission Server

Again on the command line, run the following command to connect to the Fission IPFS server:

ipfs swarm connect /ip4/3.226.224.78/tcp/4001/ipfs/QmXab6bcjmWUQZryEtmZfxS5hGoJAguw8bhLdUN5ZFQ2e5

You can also add that ip4 address line to your Bootstrap, so whenever the server starts it will be directly connected to our servers.

IPFS Companion Browser Extension

To really make use of running a local IPFS node, install the IPFS Companion Browser Extension.

You can run the Android versions of Firefox or Brave on your Chromebook, but more likely you’ll want the Chrome plugin.