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The command gnunet-publish can be used to add content to the network.
The basic format of the command is
$ gnunet-publish [-n] [-k KEYWORDS]* [-m TYPE:VALUE] FILENAME
Important command-line options
The option -k is used to specify keywords for the file that should be inserted.
You can supply any number of keywords, and each of the keywords will be sufficient to locate and retrieve the file.
The -m option is used to specify meta-data, such as descriptions. You can use -m multiple times. The TYPE passed must be from the list of meta-data types known to libextractor. You can obtain this list by running extract -L.
Use quotes around the entire meta-data argument if the value contains spaces.
The meta-data is displayed to other users when they select which files to download. The meta-data and the keywords are optional and maybe inferred using GNU libextractor.
gnunet-publish has a few additional options to handle namespaces and directories.
See the man-page for details.
Indexing vs. Inserting
By default, GNUnet indexes a file instead of making a full copy. This is much more efficient, but requries the file to stay unaltered at the location where it was when it was indexed. If you intend to move, delete or alter a file, consider using the option -n which will force GNUnet to make a copy of the file in the database.
Since it is much less efficient, this is strongly discouraged for large files. When GNUnet indexes a file (default), GNUnet does not create an additional encrypted copy of the file but just computes a summary (or index) of the file. That summary is approximately two percent of the size of the original file and is stored in GNUnet’s database. Whenever a request for a part of an indexed file reaches GNUnet, this part is encrypted on-demand and send out. This way, there is no need for an additional encrypted copy of the file to stay anywhere on the drive. This is different from other systems, such as Freenet, where each file that is put online must be in Freenet’s database in encrypted format, doubling the space requirements if the user wants to preseve a directly accessible copy in plaintext.
Thus indexing should be used for all files where the user will keep using this file (at the location given to gnunet-publish) and does not want to retrieve it back from GNUnet each time. If you want to remove a file that you have indexed from the local peer, use the tool gnunet-unindex to un-index the file.
The option -n may be used if the user fears that the file might be found on his drive (assuming the computer comes under the control of an adversary).
When used with the -n flag, the user has a much better chance of denying knowledge of the existence of the file, even if it is still (encrypted) on the drive and the adversary is able to crack the encryption (e.g. by guessing the keyword.