In order to have the IPFS daemon run on boot you will need to create a systemd service.
This is quite simple but fairly picky. First you will create a new file called ipfs.service.
This file should contain:
[Unit]
Description=IPFS daemon
After=network.target
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/ipfs daemon
Restart=on-failure
User=<user_to_run_as>
[Install]
WantedBy=default.target
Now save this file as:
/etc/systemd/system/ipfs.service
Now systemctl will be able to find your IPFS service.
Make sure the daemon is stopped, the path in ExecStart points to your IPFS executable, and User is set.
Test your new system service is properly configured with:
sudo systemctl start ipfs.service
ipfs id
If the second command returns your peer info, then the service is properly configured. Enable it on boot with:
sudo systemctl enable ipfs.service
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/default.target.wants/ipfs.service to /etc/systemd/system/ipfs.service.
This will notify you that a symlink has been created, which means success!
This document assumes you are running a Debian system. Check your operating system's systemd documentation if
you run into trouble.
When using the IPFS API, you will almost certainly run into "Cross-Origin Request Rejected" and XHR errors.
To mitigate this, run the following commands on the machine running the IPFS daemon:
ipfs config --json API.HTTPHeaders.Access-Control-Allow-Origin '["example.com"]'
ipfs config --json API.HTTPHeaders.Access-Control-Allow-Methods '["GET", "POST"]'
ipfs config --json API.HTTPHeaders.Access-Control-Allow-Credentials '["true"]'
And if you want to use the API from somewhere other than the machine running the IPFS daemon:
ipfs config Addresses.API "/ip4/0.0.0.0/tcp/5001"
Ensure your firewall rules are acceptable to you for this one.