Go-ipfs: docs: Which ports serve which purpose?

[funkyfuture]

Type:

Documentation enhancement

Description:

There are at least five ports that go-ipfs is listening to (compare Dockerfile), but I can't find anything specific about their purposes as a complete overview in the docs. For example the ipfs cluster docs do that very well.

As I'm intending to setup a public gateway I'd like to be informed about these aspects in order to configure the whole setup. A documentation of this can also help to understand the software's architecture.

[magik6k]

TL;DR version before anyone writes this down properly:

• 4001 - default libp2p swarm port - should be open to public for all nodes if possible
• 5001 - API port - provides write/admin access to the node, shouldn't be exposed at all
• 8080 - Gateway + read only API subset - quite safe to expose, but operating public gateway may still be a risk in some ways (there are some proposals on how to make this safer - like https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/5513)

There may be some other ports open by subsystems (like 5353 udp for mdns), but they don't really matter in most configs

[funkyfuture]

thanks so far. in the Dockerfile these are also exposed:

• 4002/udp
• 8081

i think regarding 8080 the wording can include something like

you may make this endpoint publicly available with a proxy or webserver as https://ipfs.example.org

[Stebalien]

Those look out of date. They should be:

• 4002/udp is historical (was used for UTP which has been deprecated, for now at least).
• 8081 can be used for the websocket transfer. However ,this isn't enabled by default.

But yes, this should all be commented. Mind documenting it in the docker file?