Pinning
Each Bee node is configured to reserve a certain amount of memory on your computer's hard drive to store and serve chunks within their neighbourhood of responsibility for other nodes in the Swarm network. Once this alloted space has been filled, each Bee node deletes older chunks to make way for newer ones as they are uploaded by the network.
Each time a chunk is accessed, it is moved back to the end of the deletion queue, so that regularly accessed content stays alive in the network and is not deleted by a node's garbage collection routine.
Bee nodes provide a facility to pin important content so that it is not deleted by the node's garbage collection routine. Chunks can be pinned either during upload, or retrospectively using the Swarm reference.
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Pin During UploadTo store content so that it will persist even when Bee's garbage collection routine is deleting old chunks, we simply pass the Swarm-Pin
header set to true
when uploading.
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Administer Pinned ContentTo check what content is currently pinned on your node, query the pins
endpoint of your Bee API:
or, to check for specific references:
A 404
response indicates the content is not available.
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Unpinning ContentWe can unpin content by sending a DELETE
request to the pinning endpoint using the same reference:
Now, when check again, we will get a 404
error as the content is no longer pinned.
info
Pinning and unpinning is possible for files (as in the example) and also the chunks, directories, and bytes endpoints. See the API documentation for more details.
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Pinning Already Uploaded ContentThe previous example showed how we can pin content upon upload. It is also possible to pin content that is already uploaded and present in the Swarm.
To do so, we can send a POST
request including the swarm reference to the files pinning endpoint.
The pin
operation will attempt to fetch the content from the network if it is not available on the local node.
Now, if we query our files pinning endpoint again, the pin counter will once again have been incremented.
warning
While the pin operation will attempt to fetch content from the network if it is not available locally, we advise you to ensure that the content is available locally before calling the pin operation. If the content, for whatever reason, is only fetched partially from the network, the pin operation only partly succeeds and leaves the internal administration of pinning in an inconsistent state.