kubo/docs/changelogs/v0.37.md

Kubo changelog v0.37

This release was brought to you by the Shipyard team.

• v0.37.0

v0.37.0

• Overview
• 🔦 Highlights
  • 🚀 Repository migration from v16 to v17 with embedded tooling
  • 🚦 Gateway concurrent request limits and retrieval timeouts
  • 🔧 AutoConf: Complete control over network defaults
  • New IPNS publishing options
  • Clear provide queue when reprovide strategy changes
  • 🪵 Revamped ipfs log level command
  • 📌 Named pins in ipfs add command
  • Custom sequence numbers in ipfs name publish
  • ⚙️ Reprovider.Strategy is now consistently respected
  • Removed unnecessary dependencies
  • Improved ipfs cid
  • Deprecated ipfs stats reprovide
  • 🔄 AutoRelay now uses all connected peers for relay discovery
  • 📊 Anonymous telemetry for better feature prioritization
• 📦️ Important dependency updates
• 📝 Changelog
• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Contributors

Overview

🔦 Highlights

🚀 Repository migration from v16 to v17 with embedded tooling

This release migrates the Kubo repository from version 16 to version 17. Migrations are now built directly into the binary - completing in milliseconds without internet access or external downloads.

ipfs daemon --migrate performs migrations automatically. Manual migration: ipfs repo migrate --to=17 (or --to=16 --allow-downgrade for compatibility). Embedded migrations apply to v17+; older versions still require external tools.

Legacy migration deprecation: Support for legacy migrations that download binaries from the internet will be removed in a future version. Only embedded migrations for the last 3 releases will be supported. Users with very old repositories should update in stages rather than skipping multiple versions.

🚦 Gateway concurrent request limits and retrieval timeouts

New configurable limits protect gateway resources during high load:

• Gateway.RetrievalTimeout (default: 30s): Maximum duration for content retrieval. Returns 504 Gateway Timeout when exceeded - applies to both initial retrieval (time to first byte) and between subsequent writes.
• Gateway.MaxConcurrentRequests (default: 4096): Limits concurrent HTTP requests. Returns 429 Too Many Requests when exceeded. Protects nodes from traffic spikes and resource exhaustion, especially useful behind reverse proxies without rate-limiting.

New Prometheus metrics for monitoring:

• ipfs_http_gw_concurrent_requests: Current requests being processed
• ipfs_http_gw_responses_total: HTTP responses by status code
• ipfs_http_gw_retrieval_timeouts_total: Timeouts by status code and truncation status

Tuning tips:

• Monitor metrics to understand gateway behavior and adjust based on observations
• Watch ipfs_http_gw_concurrent_requests for saturation
• Track ipfs_http_gw_retrieval_timeouts_total vs success rates to identify timeout patterns indicating routing or storage provider issues

🔧 AutoConf: Complete control over network defaults

Configuration fields now support ["auto"] placeholders that resolve to network defaults from AutoConf.URL. These defaults can be inspected, replaced with custom values, or disabled entirely. Previously, empty configuration fields like Routing.DelegatedRouters: [] would use hardcoded defaults - this system makes those defaults explicit through "auto" values. When upgrading to Kubo 0.37, custom configurations remain unchanged.

New --expand-auto flag shows resolved values for any config field:

ipfs config show --expand-auto                      # View all resolved endpoints
ipfs config Bootstrap --expand-auto                 # Check specific values
ipfs config Routing.DelegatedRouters --expand-auto
ipfs config DNS.Resolvers --expand-auto

Configuration can be managed via:

• Replace "auto" with custom endpoints or set [] to disable features
• Switch modes with --profile=autoconf-on|autoconf-off
• Configure via AutoConf.Enabled and custom manifests via AutoConf.URL

# Enable automatic configuration
ipfs config profiles apply autoconf-on

# Or manually set specific fields
ipfs config Bootstrap '["auto"]'
ipfs config --json DNS.Resolvers '{".": ["https://dns.example.com/dns-query"], "eth.": ["auto"]}'

Organizations can host custom AutoConf manifests for private networks. See AutoConf documentation and format spec at https://conf.ipfs-mainnet.org/

New IPNS publishing options

Added support for controlling IPNS record publishing strategies.

Delegated publishers configuration:

Ipns.DelegatedPublishers configures HTTP endpoints for IPNS publishing. Supports "auto" for network defaults or custom HTTP endpoints.

New command flags:

# Publish only to HTTP services defined in Ipns.DelegatedPublishers (skip DHT entirely)
ipfs name publish --delegated-only /ipfs/QmHash

# Publish only locally (no network requests)
ipfs name publish --allow-offline /ipfs/QmHash

These flags enable HTTP-only publishing or offline-only operations for testing.

Clear provide queue when reprovide strategy changes

Changing Reprovider.Strategy and restarting Kubo now automatically clears the provide queue. Only content matching the new strategy will be announced.

Manual queue clearing is also available:

• ipfs provide clear - clear all queued content announcements

Note

Upgrading to Kubo 0.37 will automatically clear any preexisting provide queue. The next time Reprovider.Interval hits, Reprovider.Strategy will be executed on a clean slate, ensuring consistent behavior with your current configuration.

🪵 Revamped ipfs log level command

The ipfs log level command has been completely revamped to support both getting and setting log levels with a unified interface.

New: Getting log levels

• ipfs log level - Shows default level only
• ipfs log level all - Shows log level for every subsystem, including default level
• ipfs log level foo - Shows log level for a specific subsystem only
• Kubo RPC API: POST /api/v0/log/level?arg=<subsystem>

Enhanced: Setting log levels

• ipfs log level foo debug - Sets "foo" subsystem to "debug" level
• ipfs log level all info - Sets all subsystems to "info" level (convenient, no escaping)
• ipfs log level '*' info - Equivalent to above but requires shell escaping
• ipfs log level foo default - Sets "foo" subsystem to current default level

The command now provides full visibility into your current logging configuration while maintaining full backward compatibility. Both all and * work for specifying all subsystems, with all being more convenient since it doesn't require shell escaping.

🧷 Named pins in ipfs add command

Added --pin-name flag to ipfs add for assigning names to pins.

$ ipfs add --pin-name=testname cat.jpg
added bafybeigdyrzt5sfp7udm7hu76uh7y26nf3efuylqabf3oclgtqy55fbzdi cat.jpg

$ ipfs pin ls --names
bafybeigdyrzt5sfp7udm7hu76uh7y26nf3efuylqabf3oclgtqy55fbzdi recursive testname

⚙️ Reprovider.Strategy is now consistently respected

Prior to this version, files added, blocks received etc. were "provided" to the network (announced on the DHT) regardless of the "reproviding strategy" setting. For example:

• Strategy set to "pinned" + ipfs add --pin=false → file was provided regardless
• Strategy set to "roots" + ipfs pin add → all blocks (not only the root) were provided

Only the periodic "reproviding" action (runs every 22h by default) respected the strategy.

This was inefficient as content that should not be provided was getting provided once. Now all operations respect Reprovider.Strategy. If set to "roots", no blocks other than pin roots will be provided regardless of what is fetched, added etc.

Note

Behavior change: The --offline flag no longer affects providing behavior. Both ipfs add and ipfs --offline add now provide blocks according to the reproviding strategy when run against an online daemon (previously --offline add did not provide). Since ipfs add has been nearly as fast as offline mode since v0.35, --offline is rarely needed. To run truly offline operations, use ipfs --offline daemon.

Removed unnecessary dependencies

Kubo has been cleaned up by removing unnecessary dependencies and packages:

• Removed thirdparty/assert (replaced by github.com/stretchr/testify/require)
• Removed thirdparty/dir (replaced by misc/fsutil)
• Removed thirdparty/notifier (unused)
• Removed goprocess dependency (replaced with native Go context patterns)

These changes reduce the dependency footprint while improving code maintainability and following Go best practices.

Custom sequence numbers in ipfs name publish

Added --sequence flag to ipfs name publish for setting custom sequence numbers in IPNS records. This enables advanced use cases like manually coordinating updates across multiple nodes. See ipfs name publish --help for details.

Improved ipfs cid

Certain ipfs cid commands can now be run without a daemon or repository, and return correct exit code 1 on error, making it easier to perform CID conversion in scripts and CI/CD pipelines.

While at it, we also fixed unicode support in ipfs cid bases --prefix to correctly show base256emoji 🚀 :-)

Deprecated ipfs stats reprovide

The ipfs stats reprovide command has moved to ipfs provide stat. This was done to organize provider commands in one location.

Note

ipfs stats reprovide still works, but is marked as deprecated and will be removed in a future release.

🔄 AutoRelay now uses all connected peers for relay discovery

AutoRelay's relay discovery now includes all connected peers as potential relay candidates, not just peers discovered through the DHT. This allows peers connected via HTTP routing and manual ipfs swarm connect commands to serve as relays, improving connectivity for nodes using non-DHT routing configurations.

📊 Anonymous telemetry for better feature prioritization

Per a suggestion from the IPFS Foundation, Kubo now sends optional anonymized telemetry information to Shipyard maintainers.

Privacy first: The telemetry system collects only anonymous data - no personally identifiable information, file paths, or content data. A random UUID is generated on first run for anonymous identification. Users are notified before any data is sent and have time to opt-out.

Why: We want to better understand Kubo usage across the ecosystem so we can better direct funding and work efforts. For example, we have little insights into how many nodes are NAT'ed and rely on AutoNAT for reachability. Some of the information can be inferred by crawling the network or logging /identify details in the bootstrappers, but users have no way of opting out from that, so we believe it is more transparent to concentrate this functionality in one place.

What: Currently, we send the following anonymous metrics:

  "uuid": "<unique_uuid>",
  "agent_version": "kubo/0.37.0-dev",
  "private_network": false,
  "bootstrappers_custom": false,
  "repo_size_bucket": 1073741824,
  "uptime_bucket": 86400000000000,
  "reprovider_strategy": "pinned",
  "routing_type": "auto",
  "routing_accelerated_dht_client": false,
  "routing_delegated_count": 0,
  "autonat_service_mode": "enabled",
  "autonat_reachability": "",
  "autoconf": true,
  "autoconf_custom": false,
  "swarm_enable_hole_punching": true,
  "swarm_circuit_addresses": false,
  "swarm_ipv4_public_addresses": true,
  "swarm_ipv6_public_addresses": true,
  "auto_tls_auto_wss": true,
  "auto_tls_domain_suffix_custom": false,
  "discovery_mdns_enabled": true,
  "platform_os": "linux",
  "platform_arch": "amd64",
  "platform_containerized": false,
  "platform_vm": false

The exact data sent for your node can be inspected by setting GOLOG_LOG_LEVEL="telemetry=debug". Users will see an informative message the first time they launch a telemetry-enabled daemon, with time to opt-out before any data is collected. Telemetry data is sent every 24h, with the first collection starting 15 minutes after daemon launch.

User control: You can opt-out at any time:

• Set environment variable IPFS_TELEMETRY=off before starting the daemon
• Or run ipfs config Plugins.Plugins.telemetry.Config.Mode off and restart the daemon

The telemetry plugin code lives in plugin/plugins/telemetry.

Learn more: /kubo/docs/telemetry.md

📦️ Important dependency updates

• update go-libp2p to v0.43.0 (incl. v0.42.1)
• update p2p-forge/client to v0.6.1
• update boxo to v0.33.1
• update ipfs-webui to v4.8.0
• update to Go 1.25

📝 Changelog

👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Contributors