Ability to reinitialize ipfs identity

[jvsteiner]

I would like to be able to programmatically provision a large number of ipfs nodes, each with their own identity, on aws.

I made an aws image with ipfs preinstalled, but they are all clones of the original machine, with the same id.

The ipfs init command does not have a --force option to make it possible to regenerate a new key pair, and overwrite a previously generated keypair. This makes it more difficult than it should be to spin up large numbers of ipfs nodes for testing.

[jvsteiner]

and ok, I found a reasonable workaround, which is just to remove the .ipfs directory first.

[Stebalien]

Yeah, the correct solution here is to just remove the old repo. We could add a force but that's a rather dangerous option.

[kuabhish]

@jvsteiner
My ipfs cli commands were working fine. But I deleted the folder a few times.
Now the ipfs cat /ipfs/HASH/readme doesn't run.

Error is:
Error: invalid path "C:/Program Files/Git/ipfs/<HASH>/readme": illegal base32 data at input byte 0

[Stebalien]

@kuabhish your issue is #4190.

[hsanjuan]

Slightly related to this #6262.

[Jorropo]

ipfs key rotate exists now