Reconnecting Peers Periodically

Reconnecting Periodically | Medium Article

Peers have a tendency to disconnect from each other if not reconnected manually periodically, so to combat this, you may add the following two files to periodically reconnect to your swarm peers.

sudo su -
cat <<EOF > /lib/systemd/system/gateway-connector.service
[Unit]
Description=Job that periodically connects this IPFS node to the gateway node
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/ipfs swarm connect <ADD_MULTIPLE_CONNECTIONS_HERE_SPACE_SEPARATED> # /ip4/52.70.167.190/tcp/4001/ipfs/QmZ5gLTZwvfD5DkbbaFFX4YJCi7f4C5oQAgq8qpjL8S1ur /ip4/34.224.152.33/tcp/4001/ipfs/QmcCX4b3EF3eXaDe5dgxTL9mXbyci4FwcJAjWqpub5vCXM
Environment="IPFS_PATH=/root/.ipfs"
EOF
exit

sudo su -
cat <<EOF > /lib/systemd/system/gateway-connector.timer
[Unit]
Description=Timer that periodically triggers gateway-connector.service
[Timer]
OnBootSec=3min
OnUnitActiveSec=1min
[Install]
WantedBy=timers.target
EOF
exit

Now you can enable and start the service:

sudo systemctl enable gateway-connector.timer
sudo systemctl start gateway-connector.timer

To double checked this worked, run:

systemctl list-timers

You should see an entry for your gateway connector service. You can also check the status of its last execution attempt by running:

systemctl status gateway-connector

Finally you can monitor the process with:

journalctl -f | grep ipfs