Aleph v0.2.0 Release Notes

c.pascariello

Published in

Aleph.im

3 min readFeb 22, 2022

Codename “Asimov, A new foundation.”

TLDR;

Support for FORGET messages
A new dedicated service handles P2P connections
Node Software private keys need to be migrated for the new service to work
Many API improvements and fixes
Deadline 1st of March, 15:00 CET

How to upgrade or install
👉 https://pyaleph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guides/index.html

Breaking changes

This release requires a new way to manage private keys. The private key must now be provided in a new serialized format. Use the configuration updater to migrate to the new format.
The “protocol” P2P config is disabled until further notice as it was not working properly.
MongoDB becomes the only supported internal storage engine. RocksDB is not supported anymore.

Main features

FORGET message

This is a new type of message. It is designed to order the explicit deletion of a message by a user.

When a FORGET message is received by a node, it will immediately:

remove the ‘content’ and ‘item_content’ sections of the targeted messages
add a field ‘forgotten_by’ that references to the processed FORGET message

The FORGET message will only be accepted if either:

the sender of the FORGET matches the ‘sender’ field of the message
the targeted message was created by a VM and the sender of the FORGET matches the ‘sender’ of the VM

If the forgotten message is of type STORE, the number of references to the data will be counted.
If the new count amounts to zero, the file will be deleted from the database or unpinned and cleared from IPFS.

P2P daemon

P2P communication is now managed with the official libp2p daemon.
This allows us to get rid of a dependency on the unmaintained py-libp2p library.

This in turn enabled many improvements. We:

Moved to newer versions of many dependencies
Resolved many bugs related to P2P communication
Simplified the overall architecture of PyAleph.

API improvements

Calling /api/v0/messages.json with unsupported fields returns a proper error message instead of the obscure 500 Internal Server Error
Improved reliability of the Websocket API
New parameters to /api/v0/messages.json: contentKeys, startDate, endDate.

Other changes

The --gen-key option is renamed to --gen-keys. It now stores the public key along with the private key, and a serialized version of the private key for use by the P2P daemon.
The private key for the P2P host can no longer be provided through the config.yml file using the p2p.keyfield. The key must be provided as a serialized file in the keys directory.
Decommissioned the dockerized VMs as they were replaced by the micro-VMs.
Introduced a new tool called the configuration updater to manage changes in the configuration files and key files between versions.
Fixed minor issues in the index page of the web service.
Optimized the processing of messages by prioritizing new messages over messages that are waiting for a retry.
Add support for a IPFS content identifier (CID) format version 1.
Improve the reliability of the Websocket API
A new API /api/v0/storage/count/<storage-hash> exposes the number of times a IPFS/storage hash is pinned
A new metric exposes the number of files pinned that belong to a chain and cannot be unpinned
Operators can now distinguish the different processes of the node
Fixed issues where errors could not be reported on Sentry
Fixed an issue where the logging level was different in subprocesses

How to upgrade or install 👉 https://pyaleph.readthedocs.io/en/latest/guides/index.htm

About Aleph.im

Aleph.im is a distributed cloud platform that provides serverless trusted computing services, file storage and database hosting to its users. Aleph.im offers a decentralized solution that could rival traditional centralized cloud computing. It provides dApps of any chain instant access to database solutions thanks to its scalable peer-to-peer network and programming language-agnostic interface. For more information visit aleph.im

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