Partial downloads (streaming?)

[harlantwood]

As a user of the API module, I'd like to download the first 5KB or so of a text file in ipfs, to generate a preview. Can I do this, without downloading the whole file?

[harlantwood]

@jacksenechal

[dignifiedquire]

As soon as we have proper header detection (ipfs/kubo#1979) cat will stream. But there is no way to abort requests in the browser (whatwg/fetch#27) so effectively you will always pull down the whole file, unless go-ipfs directly adds a method for just requesting a partial file.

[daviddias]

AFAIK, cat is streaming now, right?

[dignifiedquire]

pretty sure it does yes

[daviddias]

@harlantwood You might want to confirm with your use case. Let us know if you hit any roadblock.

[daviddias]

As @dignifiedquire mentioned, you are always able to get the first block (256KiB) through a object.get or block.get request, but that would be that you would implement your how mechanism to fetch. Does that suit you, @harlantwood ?

[harlantwood]

Great, I'll close this for now. When I get back to using this directly again, I'll check the progress and reopen if necessary.

Thanks for the work and progress on this.