varde

A small, boring, distro-packageable Linux daemon that owns a content-addressed blob store and mirrors content between consenting peers, built on iroh (iroh-blobs 0.35). Applications talk to it over a unix socket: "add this path", "pin this hash", "materialize hash X at path Y". Think: what Windows Delivery Optimization is for updates — generalized, open, legible.

varde (Norwegian): a stone cairn used as a waypoint.

Design ethos

• Infrastructure, not product. No GUI, no self-updater. A daemon, a CLI, a JSON-lines socket protocol, man pages, systemd units.
• Legible to the network. Identifiable mDNS advertisement, DSCP CS1 marking, conservative rate limits (10 MiB/s up default), LAN-only with zero WAN upload by default, all transfers stop on metered connections.
• Consent-tiered. Discovery is open; replication is explicit. Content is served only to allowlisted peers, except what you deliberately publish (--open-lan pins, exported tickets). All fetched data is BLAKE3-verified regardless — trust gates participation, not integrity.

Layout

crate	role
varde-proto	wire types for the socket API (serde, no I/O)
varde-daemon	the service: store, endpoint, policy, socket server
varde-ctl	CLI client and protocol reference implementation

dist/ holds systemd units (system + user, socket activation), scdoc man pages, an example config, and an untested Arch PKGBUILD. docs/ has per-milestone decision notes and the redoal integration sketch.

Quick start

$ varde-daemon --user &
$ varde-ctl add ~/dataset -r
added 5b1c…e0 (1234567 bytes)
$ varde-ctl pin 5b1c…e0
$ varde-ctl ticket export 5b1c…e0     # hand this to another machine
$ varde-ctl ticket import <ticket>    # ...which runs this
$ varde-ctl materialize 5b1c…e0 /srv/dataset   # reflinks when possible

Trusted peers on the same LAN sync overlapping pins automatically:

$ varde-ctl status          # shows this daemon's node id
$ varde-ctl peer trust <node-id-of-the-other-machine>   # on both ends

Building and testing

$ cargo build --release
$ cargo test --workspace          # spawns real daemons; no mocked iroh
$ cargo clippy --workspace --all-targets -- -D warnings

The metered feature (default on) needs D-Bus at runtime only; build with --no-default-features for systems without it.