The architecture of offchain::ipfs

As we explained in the introduction, offchain::ipfs is currently a fork of paritytech/substrate maintained by Equilibrium.

There are three branches of note:

• master - which will always follow paritytech/substrate in lock-step, with no modifications
• offchain_ipfs - which contains the modifications, and periodically rebases from master
• offchain_ipfs_docker - rebases from offchain_ipfs and contains the Dockerfile updates

There may be other branches at any given time for pragmatic purposes, but the three above should always exist and be suitable for their respective roles.

In the rest of this chapter, we'll show you how to build the code in these branches, and then we'll take a closer look at what modifications were made to substrate to achieve offchain::ipfs.