Creating a profile

When using Radicle for the first time, you have to create a new Radicle profile. A profile is simply a cryptographic key pair associated with some storage space on your local device. Radicle stores everything under the Radicle home directory, which defaults to ~/.radicle on most systems. To create your profile, run:

$ rad auth

Follow the instructions by entering an alias and a passphrase to protect your key pair. When you’ve completed the steps, your new Radicle DID (Decentralized Identifier) will be displayed. This identifies your device, as well as all the code you publish. Share it freely with collaborators. Your alias is a non-unique name that is shared across the network to identify your node. It can always be changed at a later time.

After running rad auth, you should have a new profile and key pair under your Radicle home. The key pair is used for identifying peers across the network, as well as signing code and other artifacts published on the network.

To avoid having to re-enter your passphrase every time a signature is required, rad auth adds your secret key to ssh-agent.

You can always display the full path to your Radicle home directory using:

$ rad self --home

The self sub-command is useful for querying profile information. You can run it without any arguments to show all of your profile information, including your DID:

$ rad self

Connecting to the network

Radicle is a peer-to-peer system. This means that there are no clients or servers; only nodes, and every user has to run their own. This ensures that there is no single point of failure, and the Radicle network can keep on existing as long as there are users to run nodes.

The Radicle node is a lightweight process that runs in the background and manages connections with other nodes, as well as data replication. To check your node’s status, run:

$ rad node status

If the node is not running, you can start it with:

$ rad node start

This will start the node in the foreground. Simply add --daemon to run the node in the background.

When daemonized, the node will log all output to a file under your Radicle home. On most systems, this will be ~/.radicle/node/node.log.

You can also display the latest logs at any time using:

$ rad node logs

After your node starts, it will attempt to connect to peers on the network.

Note that if you set up your node to be started using systemd(1), the logs will go to the system journal. These can be viewed with journalctl(1):

$ journalctl -u radicle-node -S today

To connect to a specific peer, the connect sub-command can be used: For example, to connect to the radicle.garden community node, you can run:

$ rad node connect z6MkrLMMsiPWUcNPHcRajuMi9mDfYckSoJyPwwnknocNYPm7@seed.radicle.garden:8776

The argument given to connect is called a node address. It is composed of a Node ID (NID), followed by an @ symbol, and the host name and port. You can display your NID with rad self --nid.

To make these connections permanent, such that they are always tried on startup, add the addresses to your configuration file at ~/.radicle/config.json, under the "connect" field.

Now that you’re connected to the network, we can try to clone a repository hosted on Radicle.

Cloning a repository

To clone a repository from the Radicle network, you need to be connected to a seed which is hosting the repository. Eventually, this won’t be necessary, but for now, a direct connection with the seed you are cloning from is required. Once the connection is established, you can run the rad clone command to clone a repository, by supplying a Repository Identifier (RID). RIDs are globally unique URNs that identify a repository on Radicle. For example, let’s clone the Radicle heartwood repository:

$ rad clone rad:z3gqcJUoA1n9HaHKufZs5FCSGazv5

If the command succeeds, you will have a checkout of the repository under ./heartwood, with a rad remote setup, which you can pull from and push to.

The rad remote is special in that it will always return the authoritative branch of the repo, when fetched from. This is defined as the latest commit on the repository’s default branch that a threshold of delegates have published.

Under the hood, the clone command does a few important things:

You can see all replicated and locally-available repositories using:

$ rad ls --all

By default, your node will subscribe to updates from all peers. This behavior can be changed by passing --scope followed when cloning. It can also be changed later via the rad seed command.

Publishing a repository on Radicle

To publish an existing Git repository on the Radicle network, navigate to a working copy and run the rad init command:

$ cd my-repo
$ rad init

You will be prompted to enter a repository name and default branch. Once the repository is created, the Repository Identifier (RID) will be printed. Share this with collaborators so that they can clone your repository.

Note that your new repository will only be replicated by nodes that you are connected to and either have an open tracking policy, or trust your Node ID.

The rad init command creates a special remote in your working copy named rad. Pushing to this remote publishes changes to your local storage and to the network.

You can view information about the rad remote with:

$ git remote show rad

You can display the Repository ID (RID) from the root of any Git repository by running:

$ rad .

You can also show the repository’s identity payload, which contains its name, description and default branch by running:

$ rad inspect --payload