Dat shared files

This module is a helper around dat to make it easier to share files instead of directories.

When sharing, dat creates a .dat folder with metadata about the shared files. While it is possible to create ignore lists, it is not easy to use the same folders to share different files as different dat links. See this issue for a bit more background.

This modules solves the problem by symlinking files into folders. In this way the files are only stored once, but this also means that if you intend to share the files for a longer period of time, it is probably best to move them somewhere where they will not be deleted so easily.

Secondly once you have shared a dat link, there is no registry that easily keeps track of your shared files. This is the second purpose of this module.

The database and symlinks are stored in the ~/.dat-shared-files/ folder.

The main purpose of this module is to make it easier to integrate dat with ssb.

Example usage

var datSharedFiles = require('dat-shared-files')

datSharedFiles.shareFile(filePath, (err, datLink) => {
  if (err) console.error(err)
  else console.log('new dat:', datLink)
})

API

shareFile(file, cb)

Takes a filepath and creates a dat, adds it to local db of dats being shared, and calls back with err or the dat link as second argument.

shareFiles(files, cb)

Takes a list of filepaths and creates a dat, adds it to local db of dats being shared, and calls back with err or the dat link as second argument.

shareAll(cb)

Reads the list of all DATs made by this module, and starts sharing them all. Calls back with err or an array of all dat links currently registered.

listLinks(cb)

Calls back with err or an array of all dat links currently registered.

datLink(datLink, cb)

Calls back with err or the path to where the file for the named dat link are currently stored.

removeLink(datLink, cb)

Removes the DAT from the database, meaning this DAT will not be included in functionality like e.g. datShareFiles. Will not err if link is not found.

CLI

Can also be installed globally as dat-shared-files, where the above functionality is available from the command line (see -h).

See also

ssb-dat-autoshare for more integration between dat and ssb.