Bee Dashboard
TLDR; Try out Bee Dashboard which can help you setup your Bee node, monitor its status and perform actions like uploading files and cashing out cheques. Special thanks to our contributors matmertz25, centerorbit and tmm360
Good infrastructure is something that you are using and you don’t even think about it. It just works.
At Swarm, we are striving to build just that. Good infrastructure. But this is a process and just as it took skilled engineers to set up wireless networks 20 years ago, we too are at the stage where starting up a Bee node entails several steps with instructions differing greatly between operating systems. We are extremely grateful to everyone who has already put their time and effort into running one of the 51,000 Bee nodes. Just as we announced the Rise of the Bee airdrop, we were quickly reminded that setting up the nodes is not as user friendly as we would like it to be. We always wanted to build a UI for Swarm, but as we had other more pressing tasks, we decided to offer it to the community as a bounty. The end result was a rather nice surprise.
What is it?
The Bee Dashboard is a web app that can help you set up your Bee node. It connects to your locally running node, checks the status of different API endpoints and offers troubleshooting.
Once your node is working, the status page will show information about your node such as the version of your Bee node, Ethereum Address or your PSS public key.
This is all we asked for when we proposed the bounty. However, matmertz25 did not stop there and built extra functionality like uploading and downloading files, exploring the peer connections or even managing the node accounting.
The accounting feature is especially attractive for everyone participating in the Rise of the Bee airdrop. You can now use a user interface to see your peer balances and cash out any outstanding cheques.
How do I run it?
For now, you will still need a terminal. Follow the install, build and serve instructions on the official Bee Dashboard github page
What is the project’s future?
The ultimate goal of the project is to be a downloadable app that installs and setups your Bee node and helps you keep it up-to-date. We are heading there in three stages.
- 0.1.0 — Web app: This is where we are right now. Users can download and run this in their web browser.
- 0.2.0 — Electron app: A downloadable app that can run on linux, mac or windows and connects to a separately running Bee node.
- 0.3.0 — Bee Desktop: A downloadable app that can install Bee and helps you to configure it.
Other notable features are internationalization or being able to manage several Bee nodes at once.
How can I help?
From the start, this has been a community project, built by community members and solving issues our users have. We would like to keep it that way.
- Try it out.
- Tell us how you like it. What doesn’t quite work for you? What can we improve? What you would like to do that the app is missing?
- Pick one of the issues on github (Help Wanted issues are a good start).
- (soon) Do you speak a language we don’t? Help us translate the app.
A big thank you to our contributors — matmertz25, centerorbit and tmm360.
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