blog/source/docs/storage_javascript.md

title: Storage APIs in JavaScript layout: docs

As mentioned in our guide on Using EmbarkJS, Embark's companion JavaScript library EmbarkJS comes with APIs specifically designed to make working with decentralized Storages a breeze. Let's a have closer look at what EmbarkJS.Storage has to offer.

Setting up EmbarkJS

By default Embark will automatically initialize EmbarkJS with the provider configured at config/storage.js. However if we are using EmbarkJS directly or wish to change the provider configuration at run time, we can do so using the setProvider() method:

EmbarkJS.Storage.setProvider('swarm', options);

Options are optional and if provided, will override the values in storage.js. Here's what a manual configuration could look like:

EmbarkJS.Storage.setProvider('ipfs', {
  server: 'localhost',
  port: '5001'
});

// OR

EmbarkJS.Storage.setProvider('swarm', {
  server: 'swarm-gateways.net',
  port: '80'
});

Saving text data

String data can be easily uploaded to the configured storage using EmbarkJS.Storage.saveText(). This method takes any string and returns a Promise that resolves with a storage hash that can then be used to retrieve the data:

EmbarkJS.Storage
  .saveText("hello world").then(hash => {
    ...
  });

Retrieving text data

If we happen to have a storage hash, we can use to to retrieve the data that's associated to it using EmbarkJS.Storage.get() as shown below. Just like saveText() this method returns a Promise and resolves with the data the hash points to:

EmbarkJS.Storage.get(hash).then(content =>  {
  ...
});

Upload binary data

We can upload files as binary data using EmbarkJS as well. All we need is a reference to a DOM object of type input[type=file] and pass it the uploadFile() method. So assuming we had an input that looked something like this:

<input type="file">

We can upload its data like this:

const input = document.querySelector('input[type=file"]');

EmbarkJS.Storage.uploadFile(input).then(hash => {
  ...    
})

Similar to saveText() and get(), this method returns a Promise and can be used with JavaScript's async/await syntec as well.

Display data using URLs

To display any uploaded data in the browser, we can request a fully qualified URL using EmbarkJS.Storage.getUrl() and a dedicated storage hash:

EmbarkJS.Storage.getUrl(hash).then(url => {
  ...
});

Checking for storage provider availability

We can check whether our configured storage provider is available or not using isAvailable(). This method resolves with either true or false depending on whether the service is available:

EmbarkJS.Storage.isAvailable().then(isAvailable => { 
  ...
});

IPNS registration

We can register IPFS hashes using IPNS using the register() method has shown below:

EmbarkJS.Storage.register(some_hash).then(name => {
  console.log('Registred: ', name);
});

{% notification info 'Note on registering hashes:' %} Registering a hash with IPFS can take a bit of time, so keep that in mind when relying on these APIs. {% endnotification %}

And of course, we can resolve hashes to their IPFS paths as well, using the resolve() method:

EmbarkJS.Storage.resolve(some_hash).then(name => {
  console.log('Resolved ', name);
});