HTTP Gateway Protocol

Overview

The HTTP Gateway Protocol is an extension of the Internet Computer Protocol that allows conventional HTTP clients to interact with the Internet Computer network. This is important for software such as web browsers to be able to fetch and render client-side canister code, including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as well as other static assets such as images or videos. The HTTP Gateway does this by translating between standard HTTP requests and API canister calls that the Internet Computer Protocol will understand.

You can read more about this protocol in the spec.

Projects

HTTP Canister Client

• NPM Package
• NodeJS Example

Command	Description
pnpm -F @dfinity/http-canister-client build	Build NPM package
pnpm -F http-canister-nodejs-example start	Run the NodeJS example project

Related Projects

• Response Verification
• Service Worker
• ICX Proxy
• Desktop HTTP Proxy

Contributing

Check out our contribution guidelines.

Setup

• Install pre-commit
• Install commitizen
• Install NVM

Install the correct version of NodeJS:

nvm install

Activate the correct version of NodeJS:

nvm use

Install and activate the correct version of PNPM:

corepack enable

Making a Commit

cz commit

See Conventional commits for more information on the commit message formats

Package naming conventions

NPM packages are named @dfinity/<package-name> and the folder name is <package-name>-js.

Referencing an NPM package

An NPM package can be referenced using the package name and PNPM workspace protocol in package.json:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "@dfinity/certificate-verification": "workspace:*"
  }
}