Lesson: Access IPFS content through any IPFS gateway
Goals
This lesson covers using any IPFS gateway to access IPFS content. It's a condensed review of the Lesson on Using an HTTP browser to retrieve files from a local IPFS gateway
After doing this Lesson you will be able to
Use the HTTP address of any IPFS gateway to access IPFS content
Steps
Step 1: Get the address of a gateway
As we covered in Tutorial: Going Online - Joining the Distributed Web, when you run an IPFS daemon, it exposes an HTTP endpoint that acts as a gateway between HTTP and the IPFS network. This means that you can, in theory, point your web browser at any IPFS node's HTTP endpoint and use it as a gateway. In reality, the person operating that node usually needs to take extra steps to make their gateway available over HTTP (NAT traversal, etc).
For these examples we will use the gateway at http://dweb.link
Step 2: Build the Path to your Content
As described in the Lesson on Using an HTTP browser to retrieve files from local IPFS gateway, you must tell the gateway whether you're requesting content with an IPFS hash or an IPNS hash. If you're using the hash of a specific snapshot of content -- for example a file that someone added to IPFS, use the path /ipfs/<your-ipfs-hash>. If you're using an IPNS hash to get the latest version of some content that gets updated over time, for example a website that gets fresh content every day, use the path /ipns/<your-ipns-hash>
Step 3: Request the content from the gateway
Combine the gateway's address (ie. http://dweb.link) with the path to your content (ie. /ipfs/<your-ipfs-hash>). Use that to request the content.
To view the wikipedia page we're using as an example in all of the lessons in the Tutorial on The Myriad Ways to Access and Distribute IPFS Content, use these links:
latest (IPNS): http://dweb.link/ipns/QmQP99yW82xNKPxXLroxj1rMYMGF6Grwjj2o4svsdmGh7S/wiki/Anasayfa.html [correct example though this link may be stale]
latest (DNS): http://dweb.link/ipns/ipfs.io
Explanation
With the above examples, we are using an HTTP connection over the internet to someone (http://dweb.link) providing a gateway onto the IPFS network. In this way you can access information in the IPFS network at large, and you do not need to run your own IPFS gateway.
TODO
Restricting the content that your gateway will serve
Security concerns -- the gateway can see all the things that an HTTP server can see.
Next Steps
If you want to learn about the many other ways you can use IPFS to access the same content using the same content-addressed link, go to the Tutorial on The Myriad Ways to Access and Distribute IPFS Content.
Otherwise return to the tutorial on Interacting with the Classical (HTTP) web
Last updated