State of this project: proof of concept
Say YES to self-hosting and peer to peer, say NO to surveillance capitalism.
What if you could use IPFS for your website today, without asking your visitors to use a specific browser or install an extension? Offload heavy assets like images, video, pdfs, to a peer to peer network! Stop relying on proprietary platforms built for surveillance capitalism, do it today!
ipfs-cdn makes IPFS your Content Distribution Network for your static website assets*.
ipfs-cdn is a CLI tool that will:
- Add your static assets to an IPFS node.
- Manipulate HTML tags to point to the CID of the static asset.
- Add
ipfs-shim.jsand other libraries to the<head>if your HTML.
ipfs-shim.js instantiates an IPFS node in the visitor's browser and replaces the CIDs in the HTML code with their actual content, downloaded from IPFS. (The heavy lifting is done by js-ipfs.)
Note that this is not a full peer to peer solution since your website still depends on DNS resolution. Nonetheless, ipfs-cdn is still useful for many self hosting scenarios.
*: right now it supports only images and videos.
You have a static website generator. Let's say the generated output is in the directory public, then you can run:
ipfs-cdn build public -i
The command searches for all html files in public, extract and adds all static assets to IPFS, and updates the DOM with the URL of the newly created CID. Changes are done in place, so it will modify the original (generated) files. If you don't want this, drop the -i option.
Now your website is ready to be published!
If you are working on the same website or you want to help with content distribution, first build your webiste, then run:
ipfs-cdn pin public
This command will recursively iterate over all HTML files and pin to the local IPFS daemon the assets used. Regarding content availability, check the section below.
You host your static website in your server. While HTML is pretty cheap to serve, other assets like images, videos, archives, or PDF documents can be quite expensive in terms of bandwitdh. Moreover, video is a PITA to distribute properly, since it requires adaptive bitrate streaming. Hosting large files is often delegated to third party services. For example, a video is usually uploaded to YouTube of Vimeo, and then a player is embedded in the website. Platforms for other types of media are Scribd and SlideShare.
This has many downsides:
- Your visitors' data is donated to big companies.
- Your content is now under the publisher's terms of service.
- The publisher can decide to charge you, or decide that they don't like you anymore.
ipfs-cdn relies on the IPFS infrastructure. Other nodes that duplicate your content can cache it for a limited amount of time, and then delete it, so you cannot rely on them.
Content availability works better when you have a small organization behind your website, so multiple developers can run their own IPFS node and pin exactly the same assets. For example in Social Dist0rtion Protocol we have around five people that can run IPFS nodes in their laptops and home servers to distribute assets for our website. Content. In order to be all on the same page, each of us has to checkout the website respository and run ipfs-cdn pin. Content will also be cached by other nodes in the IPFS network, making the distribution more reliable. If that's not enough, the CIDs can be pinned in free services like Infura, Pinata, and more.
ipfs-deploy uploads the whole website to an IPFS directory, and returns the CID of it. The system administrator is then asked to use a DNS provider that supports redirecting to an IPFS gateway. The whole content (website and assets) is then accessed through said IPFS gateway, not making use of the IPFS peer to peer network. Given that this approach is a temporary solution until browsers implement the IPFS stack, I believe that is still sub-optimal. The progress of the IPFS team on js-ipfs makes possible to use IPFS on the browser today, and this project honors that.
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