Hosting a simple static site on IPFS

https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipns/QmWGb7PZmLb1TwsMkE1b8jVK4LGceMYMsWaSmviSucWPGG/2015/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-ipfs/

by giodamelio • 11 years ago

162 27 11 years ago

gateway.ipfs.io

lcswi• 11 years ago

That's a horrific url though, any way to 'humanise' that?

nicklaf• 11 years ago

From section 3.7.2 of the IPFS paper [1], on IPNS ("Human Friendly Names"):

While IPNS is indeed a way of assigning and reassigning names, it is not very user friendly, as it exposes long hash values as names, which are notoriously hard to remember. These work for URLs, but not for many kinds of offline transmission. Thus, IPFS increases the user-friendliness of IPNS with the following techniques.

[1] https://github.com/ipfs/papers/raw/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs-...

robsyme• 11 years ago

I think so, yes. IPNS can bootstrap of DNS if you want. By adding a DNS TXT record of the form "dnslink=/ipfs/longhorriblehashhere", you can have paths like /ipns/example.com/2015/09/15/hosting-a-website-on-ipfs/.

For example, the ipfs.io site is hosted on ipfs/ipns, and available through the gateway at https://gateway.ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.io/

_prometheus2• 11 years ago

Yes. (IPFS author here)

1. Add a TXT record to DNS <domain> with:

   dnslink="/ipns/QmWGb7PZmLb1TwsMkE1b8jVK4LGceMYMsWaSmviSucWPGG"

2. should be able to use https://ipfs.io/ipns/<domain>

See it in action here: https://ipfs.io/ipns/ipfs.io

WARNING: IPNS is still under dev. it's not robust yet, convergence may not be perfect.

RX142• 11 years ago

Also - if I remember correctly - if you visit ipfs.io with the Host header set to foo.com, it will return /ipns/foo.com.

chipsy• 11 years ago

How is "ownership" over a domain resolved?

viraptor• 11 years ago

Is there any place I can track IPNS completeness? I've seen issues / PRs / commits related to this, but just wondering if I can find a single-page/issue tracker.

doublec• 11 years ago

Morphis, ipfs and Freenet all work similarly here - allowing hosting websites in a distributed datastore. It'll be interesting to track the different usages of the systems.

I started off mirroring my blog on Freenet and and now I'm experimenting with storing it there first and using a reverse proxy to make it available on clearnet [1]. This approach would work on IPFS and Morphis too. If the clearnet site gets taken down it's always available on the distributed store and it's simple to spin up a proxy somewhere else to provide clearnet access.

For systems where unpopular data goes away over time the access via the clearnet proxy provides more access to it to make that less likely since clearnet is full of crawlers, bots, search engines etc constantly hitting it.

[1] http://bluishcoder.co.nz/2015/09/14/using-freenet-for-static...

kang2• 11 years ago

Isn't IPNS a centralised component? If not, how does it work?

detaro• 11 years ago

If I remember correctly, signed updates in the DHT that also is used for locating nodes with specific content. Check out the paper on ipfs.io, it explains all the components.

kang2• 11 years ago

From section 3.7.1 of the paper

"Because this is not a content-addressed object, pub- lishing it relies on the only mutable state distribution system in IPFS, the Routing system. The process is (1) publish the object as a regular immutable IPFS object, (2) publish its hash on the Routing system as a metadata value"

How is the ordering done? In a quickly changing content, a blockchain would be required for ordering.

eatonphil2• 11 years ago

This is the first time I'm seeing IPFS. So when the IPFS servers are running, they register themselves with some central node to let everyone know they exist/are online? This is how they get away without a static IP address? Am I thinking about this correctly?

RX142• 11 years ago

No, IPFS uses a distributed hash table to find content and nodes on the network. The only centralised servers are the gateways between the regular Internet and IPFS, due to necessity. However it is possible to run your own gateway, and many do.

eatonphil2• 11 years ago

How are new nodes discovered or registered?

pkinsky• 11 years ago

Whenever you update your site, just do step 4 again, and IPNS will make sure anyone asking for your peedID gets the hash of your latest site.

s/peedID/peerID :)

giodamelio• 11 years ago

Thanks

known• 11 years ago

php -S localhost:8000

realusername• 11 years ago

I have a small question for people who know better than me about IPFS. Does IPFS includes some equivalent of the USK (Updatable keys) concept in Freenet ? How things can be updated ?

diggan• 11 years ago

IPFS also has IPNS. IPNS allows you to use your peer id (that you get by running the daemon) as a name. So if your peed id is "A", you can point "A" to hash "123" and give "A" to the people you want to share the content with. If you now add a new thing and get the hash "456", you can update "A" to now point to that hash instead. That way, you can update the content seamlessly, without breaking things for other people.

jknoll• 11 years ago

If you use this tutorial to publish anything other than the example index.html, then attempt to view it through the proxy, it will fail with "Path Resolve error: context deadline exceeded." You need to run "ipfs daemon" on your local machine in order for it to be visible to the world.

Hosting a simple static site on IPFS

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