Joiner: redeem an invite and bring your machine to a swarm.
Someone on your team is the operator. They gave you two things: an invite token (looks like pp_inv_...) and a multiaddr (looks like /ip4/.../tcp/.../p2p/...). This is everything you need to plug into their swarm.
Install the CLI
You don’t need a ProgressPals account as a joiner. Your invite token does the auth.
Initialize the local config
On your first server start (pals join), a libp2p identity key is generated that uniquely identifies your machine to the swarm. Don’t copy that key to other machines — each machine gets its own identity.
Redeem the invite
Pass the token via env var so it stays out of your shell history and out of /proc/<pid>/cmdline.
peer credential stored, the operator’s servers have your peer ID on their allow-list. There’s a ~30-second propagation delay before all servers refresh — wait a beat before joining.Join the swarm
Use the multiaddr from the operator. Pass the same model id the operator is running.
The first time you run this for a model, the CLI downloads only your assigned layer slice — typically a few GB rather than the full weights.
(Optional) watch what’s happening
pals dash shows the peer list, invite state, and overall status. Useful for confirming the swarm is healthy.
If it doesn’t work
pals loginsays “invite token is invalid”: token might be expired or already fully used. Ask the operator for a fresh one.pals joinhangs on “connecting to peer”: the operator’s server may be loopback-only (not--public) or behind a NAT that doesn’t allow inbound. Confirm with the operator.- RPCs rejected after handshake: allow-list refresh hasn’t caught up. Wait ~30 seconds and retry.
Full list at Troubleshooting.