API layers

logos-delivery is built in three layers. Each one adds guarantees on top of the one below, and you pick how far up the stack you want to work.

Reliable Channels     ordered, tracked delivery between participants
     ▲
Messaging API         publish and subscribe on a content topic
     ▲
Kernel                the p2p protocols themselves

Kernel

The protocols a node actually speaks — relay, filter, lightpush, store, discovery, peer management. This is the transport, and everything above is built on it.

Warning

The Kernel API is an unstable, unsupported surface. It exposes per-protocol internals and may change or be removed at any time, without notice and without a deprecation cycle. Use it at your own risk.

Messaging API

Publish and subscribe on a content topic. You hand it a topic and a payload; it reaches whoever is subscribed. Delivery is best-effort: a send is reported as it progresses, but nothing is retried or acknowledged for you.

This is the stable surface, and the right layer for most applications.

Reliable Channels

A channel is a durable conversation between participants on a content topic. Sends are tracked to completion rather than fired and forgotten, and each participant is identified, so the layer can tell you when a message is fully delivered or has failed. Channel state persists, so a closed channel can be reopened where it left off.

Also a stable surface. Use it when “did that actually arrive?” matters.

What this module exposes

The Messaging API and Reliable Channels in full — creating and running a node, send / subscribe / unsubscribe, and the channel* methods, along with the events each of them reports.

From the Kernel, one method only: storeQuery, for reading historical messages back off a store node. It carries the Kernel warning above — its JSON contract follows the kernel API and can change with it.

How much of the stack a node mounts is a configuration choice, made with entryLayer when you create the node. A kernel-only node can still answer storeQuery, report node info and serve metrics, but send, subscribe and the channel* methods will fail on it. See Architecture for what each setting mounts, and the API reference for the configuration grammar.