IPFS Primer
ipfs.ioIPFS Docs
  • Introduction
  • Tutorial: Install and Initialize IPFS
    • Lesson: Download and Install IPFS
    • Lesson: Initialize your IPFS Repository
  • Tutorial: Files on IPFS
    • Lesson: Add Content to IPFS and Retrieve It
    • Lesson: Wrap Filenames and Directory Info around Content
    • Lesson: Pinning - Tell IPFS to Keep a File
  • Tutorial: Going Online - Joining the Distributed Web
    • Lesson: Connect your node to the IPFS network
    • Lesson: Find Peers on the Network
    • Lesson: Retrieve content from a Peer
  • Tutorial: Interacting with the Classical (HTTP) Web
    • Lesson: Use an HTTP browser to retrieve files from local IPFS gateway
    • Lesson: Get content through the public ipfs.io gateway
    • Lesson: Access IPFS content through any IPFS gateway
  • Tutorial: The Myriad ways to Access and Distribute IPFS Content
    • The Power of Content-addressing
    • Retrieving content from a peer
    • Review these lessons from the Tutorial on Interacting with the Classical (HTTP) Web
      • Review: Using an HTTP browser to retrieve files from local IPFS gateway
      • Review: Using the public IPFS gateways at ipfs.io
      • Review: Access IPFS content through any IPFS gateway
    • Lesson: Access IPFS content through Tor gateways (experimental)
    • Lesson: Run IPFS over Tor transport (experimental)
    • Lesson: Access IPFS content through a browser extension
    • Lesson: Sneakernets - moving the data on USB Drives and other Hardware
  • Tutorial: Making Changes on the Permanent Web
    • Lesson: Create a Simple Webpage and Add It to IPFS
    • Lesson: View Your Webpage with IPFS and Publish to IPNS
    • Lesson: Modify Your Webpage and Republish to IPNS
    • Lesson: Generate and Use a New IPNS Name Keypair
  • Tutorial: Merkle Trees and the IPFS DAG
    • Lesson: Turn a File into a Tree of Hashes
    • Lesson: The Cryptographic Hash
    • Lesson: Build a Tree of Data in IPFS Using Cryptographic Hashes to Link the Pieces (a Merkle DAG)
    • Lesson: Explore the types of software that use hash trees to track data (to come)
  • Tutorial: Dynamic Content on IPFS
    • Disclaimer: Dynamic content on IPFS is a Work in Progress (to come)
    • Lesson: Add data to the DAG (locally) (to come)
    • Lesson: Tell peers about your Changes (to come)
    • Lesson: Use hashes to get someone's changes from IPFS (to come)
    • Lesson: Use a pub/sub strategy to pass around messages about changes (to come)
    • Lesson: Resolve conflicts with a merge strategy (CRDTs) (to come)
  • Privacy and Access Controls on the Distributed Web (to come)
    • Reader Privacy & Writer Privacy (to come)
    • Private Networks (to come)
    • Encrypting Content (to come)
    • More dynamic encryption: capabilities-based encryption (to come)
    • Comparing with the classic HTTP web (feudal security, etc) (to come)
  • Keeping Data Alive: Durable Data on the Permanent Web (to come)
    • IPFS Cluster (to come)
    • Filecoin (to come)
  • Distributed Computation (to come)
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  1. Tutorial: The Myriad ways to Access and Distribute IPFS Content

Lesson: Access IPFS content through a browser extension

PreviousLesson: Run IPFS over Tor transport (experimental)NextLesson: Sneakernets - moving the data on USB Drives and other Hardware

Last updated 5 years ago

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This is a placeholder. There are currently four web browser extensions that help your retrieve content from IPFS. Each works in slightly different ways. We are in the process of consolidating that code and making it more secure before we encourage people to rely on it.

When the IPFS browser extension is complete, we will publish it on the app stores for all of the browsers that support it. When you download the extension, it will automatically recognize IPFS links and will use the IPFS peer-to-peer network to retrieve the content for you -- no HTTP gateway needed, nothing else to install on your computer, no need to use the command line. You will only have to install the browser extension and the whole IPFS network will become available to you.

We consider this the next big step to getting IPFS natively supported in web browsers. You can track this work in the github repository at . describes the state of these efforts as of April 2017.

Among other things, this support for IPFS in browsers will make it possible to start using links that are truly content-addressed, without any reference to HTTP locations, even when you access content through a web browser. We are advocating for this to be done using a new dweb: address scheme. Using the dweb: scheme, the links to the wikipedia page we're using as an example in all of the lessons in the will look like this:

  • 2017-04-30 snapshot: dweb:/ipfs/Qme2sLfe9ZMdiuWsEtajWMDzx6B7VbjzpSC2VWhtB6GoB1/wiki/Anasayfa.html

  • latest (IPNS): dweb:/ipns/QmQP99yW82xNKPxXLroxj1rMYMGF6Grwjj2o4svsdmGh7S/wiki/Anasayfa.html

  • latest (DNS): dweb:/ipns/wikipedia-on-ipfs.io

Next Steps

Return to the to learn about the many other ways you can use IPFS to access the same content using the same content-addressed link.

https://github.com/ipfs/in-web-browsers
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Tutorial on The Myriad Ways to Access and Distribute IPFS Content
Tutorial on The Myriad Ways to Access and Distribute IPFS Content