23 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
23 lines
1.5 KiB
Markdown
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# Federation
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This section will cover how federation works in Toolshed.
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## What is Federation?
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Since user of Toolshed you can search and interact the inventory of all their 'friends' that are potentially on
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different servers there is a need for a way to communicate between servers. We don't want to rely on a central server that
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stores all the data and we don't want to have a central server that handles all the communication between servers. This
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is where federation comes in. Toolshed uses a protocol that can not only exchange data with the server where the user
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is registered but also with the servers where their friends are registered.
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## How does it work?
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Any user can register on any server and creates a personal key pair. The public key is stored on the server and the private
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key is stored on the client. The private key is used to sign all requests to the server and the public key is used to
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verify the signature. Once a user has registered on a server they can send friend requests to other users containing
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their public key. If the other user accepts the friend request, the server stores the public key of the friend and
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uses it to verify access to the friend's inventory. While accepting a friend request the user also automatically sends
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their own public key to the friend's server. This way both users can access each other's inventory.
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The protocol is based on a simple HTTPS API exchanging JSON data that is signed with the user's private key. By default
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Toolshed servers provide a documentation of the API at [/docs/api](/docs/api).
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