FAQ: Database replication is not working about field-manual HOT 5 OPEN

I ran into this same problem, trying to get a DB to replicate across IPFS nodes running the node.js implementation of js-IPFS and Orbit-DB. I was trying to get a locally running node.js app (Node A) to talk with another peer running in a Virtual Machine (VM) (Node B). They did not appear to be communicating and the DB was not getting replicated. Here is how I went about debugging.

I started by adding an console.log alert whenever the replication event fired:

db.events.on('replicated', () => {
  console.log(`replication event fired`)
})

Running the software again, I could see that the replication event never fired.

I set up a third node on a Digital Ocean Droplet cloud server (Node C). After running the software I could also see the replication event was not firing. I copied the multiaddr for Node C and added it to the first two nodes with this code:

ipfs.bootstrap.add('/ip4/162.243.158.213/tcp/4002/ipfs/QmQLcCWKuxsMkRt5DJkcSw361iNLikjEBMEj6ovR6pwAb5')

I was able to ensure that Node C was in the bootstrap list with this command:

const list = await ipfs.bootstrap.list()
console.log(`list: ${util.inspect(list)}`)

As soon as I added the bootstrap.add code to the other two nodes and started them all, the replication event immediately started firing and the DB started getting replicated across the nodes.

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To help myself understand the intricacies of libp2p and orbit-db replication, I created this db-replication directory in a repo I created for such things:
https://github.com/christroutner/orbit-tests/tree/master/db-replication

Check out the README in that folder. It describes the various network configurations. The code is currently replicating the example database across firewalled peers.

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Can the answer be updated already on https://github.com/orbitdb/orbit-db/blob/master/FAQ.md#database-replication-is-not-working-why?

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@christroutner That is super cool - do you want to add that repo to the https://github.com/orbitdb/awesome-orbitdb repo in the Tools section?

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Moving this to the Field Manual Repo

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