IPFS 0.5 Meetup, 22 May 2020

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From YouTube: Your own, personal, Subdomain Gateway! - Marcin Rataj / @lidel

Description

One of the biggest improvements in go-ipfs 0.5 from the browser perspective is the addition of subdomain gateways, which provide origin isolation for every website published on IPFS! Let lidel show you how in this lightning talk from the 0.5 Release Meetup.

For more information
+ read the go-ipfs 0.5 release announcement: https://blog.ipfs.io/2020-04-28-go-ipfs-0-5-0/
+ visit the project website: https://ipfs.io
+ or follow IPFS on Twitter: https://twitter.com/IPFS

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A

In case people are not familiar with why we introduced subdomain gateways, I prepared a short section with theory and then a quick demo, so I'm little I'm working on ipfs, mostly ipfs in in web browsers. The way we represent ipfs resources and trying to make it better and I was helping with implementing some domain gateways in Co, ipfs 0.5. So something to I think the gist of the problem is that the CID, the content identifier in ipfs it specifies the content route most of people, think about files and directories.

A

So if you have a website that is a directory and you have index.html inside of that, so the root of that root directory has an identifier that CID and that's the main directory of your website. So historically, when you put your directory with your website on ipfs, you could load it from path gateways and those gateways. Look like this. You had a host name and of the gateway and then namespace immutable, ipfs content identifier, and that was the route.

A

Your content route and your website was under that, and the problem was that was a single origin for all content content routes, which meant all websites loaded from that gateway. That way are the same origin sandbox, which meant meant all the website had the same cookie jar or local storage, but also they shared permissions for things like camera, microphone, video and others. Everything was called origin, which was really problematic if you granted the permission to one website, every other IPS website had that permission.

A

Another problem was the content route was here while the URL route is here and that's what's the problem for things like static website generators which often created absolute links and those links stops expected to root, be here not here, and that introduced a lot of problems for us, so subdomain gateways tackle both problems.

A

You still have your own hostname, however. The namespace is moved to a subdomain and the content. Identifier is the very first label on the dns name, which means each cid produced unique origin per every content root. It's a super important. It aligns ipfs abstractions with how web security model works, how its implementing web browsers- and we don't like thanks to this- we don't need to do any additional work it just we get this isolation for free every content. Identify route gets own sandbox and it also means you can see here.

A

The route is the same for both URL and I P of s content route, so no problem with previewing static, web site generator builds and things like that. So that's fine. How can you enable subdomain gateway for your hostname? So in go ahead? Efs 0.5, you got config file and there was already a section about Gateway configuration in this release. We've added public gateway section and it's like a map which has a net hostname as a key, and the value is just an object with additional flags and settings.

A

In this example, I'm using example that come as the name of your gateway and all you need to do is just like define the hostname and then enable subdomains for that hostname by setting houstab dimitru and specify which paths should be exposed on that hostname. You may just want immutable paths and you don't want idns, or maybe you want IDF s and I penis and don't want to expose a API.

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That's up to you. So that's how you control it. You can also use one-liner on command line. It's multiple lines here, but I just split it for readability.

A

However, you can do this just that way and if I'm lucky I will make a quick demo of this very thing. So, let's say: I have I, have ipfs 0.5 and I initialize new repo and I applied that very config and just to verify. I really did that I.

A

Can see in the configuration you can see it's here so if I start my node now, it will get interesting because it's now exposing Gateway on a local host on this port. So just to not to bother you too much. I will jump directly to the browser demo. So if we open a chromium browser and use this gateway port as an HTTP proxy, because that's an interesting feature of go ipfs 0.5, the Gateway port is now HTTP proxy, which enables interesting things like this one, because you can see I'm starting chromium with empty profile.

A

So it looks like a new user I set a proxy to be a local gateway and then I just asked it open this URL. So the URL is the old-school power of gateway at example.com, its ipfs content, hash and then a path. So let's open it and let's open it in the new screen and hopefully yeah that they did not lie like this content. Discovery was fast.

A

So that's a critical demonstration I believe. If you look closely at the address bar what happened? It's not the URL I asked for I asked for his f1 and I got something else. So, let's, let's try to figure it out. Why why? Why is that?

A

Did I copy it now I'm, just even bad at copying. So let me cheat a little bit. I got this stuff for copying here.

A

Okay, so this is the old school URL for a path under a Spain, and when you set up your subdomain gateway, it will handle requests of the old gateways. So if you open it, the CID will get moved to a subdomain. But that's not the ruling thing it's just like swapping places. What's interesting is that if you try to load content that has and all CID V 0 the CID V 0 are those hashes that start with Q M. Everyone is familiar with them.

A

The problem is those are in Baileys 58 and those hashes are case, sensitive and browsers force lower case on the host names, which mean they will break the hash, if you put this case sensitive representation in a subdomain. So we support representing C IDs as base 22. However, people may still have those of the links and they may want to switch to a new subdomain gateway and they want the links to still work.

A

So here you can see if you open a old-school link with the case sensitive hash it, the subdomain gateway, the native subdomain Gateway Ingo ipfs will automatically convert CID V 0 to CID V 1, in vice versa, which is safe for use in subdomains, and it will return that to the browser as a redirect.

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So that's the main feature. It works also for IP NS names, which can be represented as CL v v1 in base 52 with Lee p2p key multi codec feel free to explore. I will stop my demo here. I will just point you in.

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If you are interested in running your own subdomain gateway or gantry in general, enjoy IP office repo in dogs, there's a config file which has documentation of all those options and the gateway public gateways has a very long dog which is not just description of the parameters, but it has at the very end, Gateway recipes.

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So there are some pre-built commands that you can just like, run to set up a specific type of a gateway that you want not just like sub domain, but also, if you want to just host the DNS link without housing, public hashes of other people. There are already examples there.

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That's it on my end,.