___________________________________________
title: Superhighway84 on FreeBSD
tags: freebsd smolweb ipfs
date: 2022-01-17
___________________________________________
Intro
A couple of weeks ago I saw Superhighway84 on HackerNews and started
to check it out, but didn’t get very far. I finally spent some time to
get it up and running on FreeBSD which works, but requires a few
additional steps.
[Superhighway84]: https://マリウス.com/superhighway84/
[HackerNews]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29698412
[FreeBSD]:
https://www.freebsd.org
I wanted to get Superhighway84 on a spare RaspberryPi 3 running
FreeBSD 13, primarily used for a Gemini Capsule in FreeBSD, since it
doesn’t have much traffic and is mostly idle.
[Gemini Capsule in FreeBSD]:
https://www.ecliptik.com/Gemini-Capsule-in-a-FreeBSD-Jail/
Superhighway84 is an USENET-inspired decentralized internet
discussion system, featuring a retro text user interface and powered
by IPFS and OrbitDB.
[Superhighway84]
[1]: /assets/images/posts/superhighway84/superhighway84.png
Superhighway84 in Solarized Dark terminal
IPFS on FreeBSD
Superhighway84 uses IPFS as it’s backend, making it fully
decentralized. Reading through the setup docs, an ipfs init is
required to build the initial ~/.ipfs filesystem. There is a ipfs-go
in FreeBSD ports, but it doesn’t seem to work, at least on arm64.
[IPFS]:
https://ipfs.io
[ipfs-go]:
https://www.freshports.org/sysutils/ipfs-go/
To work around this, building ipfs-go from source is doable in a few
steps,
[2]:
https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs
First, install a few required packages to compile the go binaries
$ doas pkg install gcc gmake go openssl
Next, clone the source of go-ipfs and checkout the latest stable
branch, otherwise there might be a version mismatch error on startup,
$ git clone
https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs.git
$ cd go-ipfs
$ git checkout tags/v0.11.0
Set a few environment vars to compile with gcc and use openssl,
$ export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/go/bin
$ export PATH=$PATH:$GOPATH/bin
$ export CGO_ENABLED=1
$ export GOTAGS=openssl
Build from source using gmake
$ doas gmake install
go version go1.17.5 freebsd/arm64
bin/check_go_version 1.15.2
plugin/loader/preload.sh > plugin/loader/preload.go
go fmt plugin/loader/preload.go >/dev/null
go install "-asmflags=all='-trimpath='" "-gcflags=all='-trimpath='" -ldflags="-X "github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs".CurrentCommit=67220edaa" ./cmd/ipfs
After the build is finished, copy the binary to ~/bin and export it
into the $PATH ,
$ cp ~/go/bin/ipfs ~/bin
$ export PATH="~/bin:$PATH"
Initialize ~/.ipfs and set profile config to lowpower for running on a
RaspberryPi
$ ipfs init --profile=lowpower
Building Superhighway84
With IPFS initialized, build Superhighway84 and copy the binary to
~/bin. There are binary releases for FreeBSD arm64, but compiling it
from source is relatively easy as well.
[binary releases]:
https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84/releases/tag/v0.0.11
$ git clone
https://github.com/mrusme/superhighway84.git
$ cd superhighway84
$ go build .
$ cp superhighway64 ~/bin
Start up superhighway84, and wait a few minutes to fully sync. Using a
“light” terminal theme is not recommened as it’s difficult to read,
and I recommended switching to a darker terminal theme.
$ superhighway84