Quick Start / Demo

Thanks for your interest in IPNS-Link. Welcome and Happy Hosting 😊

Let's get going. Feel free to report issues with this tutorial here.

Quick Start / Demo
- Aim
- Steps

Aim

Expose local web-server running at, say, port 8000 with ipns-link.

Steps

Install `ipns-link`

git clone https://github.com/ipns-link/ipns-link
cd ipns-link

If you have sudo privilege,

sudo install ipns-link /usr/local/bin/

Otherwise,

mkdir -p ~/.bin
cp ipns-link ~/.bin
export PATH="${PATH}":"${HOME}"/.bin

Also put the last command in your .bashrc file.

Initialize

ipns-link init

This asks for your favorite text-editor. Provide the corresponding command or absolute path to the executable when prompted.

Note: You can always change the editor with ipns-link config.

Launch the daemon

ipns-link daemon

Generate key

Let's now generate the Origin's/service's keypair that will later expose our Origin. Because the key is hard to remember, we must give it a human-friendly name, e.g. my-site.

ipns-link gen my-site

Expose our server

There are two ways to do this:

Edit the config specific to the key named my-site with
```
ipns-link config my-site
```
and put local.endpoint: "http://localhost:8000". Then, expose my-site simply as
```
ipns-link expose my-site
```
Or, you can simply do
```
ipns-link expose my-site localhost:8000
```

If everything goes alright, our site should be accessible using any IPNS-Link Gateway within a few minutes. Try the URL shown at the screen, for example. You can even grab the /ipns/<key> part from the URL and use any good old IPFS-gateway, e.g. https://ipfs.io/ipns/<key>/. It would redirect the browser to an IPNS-Link Gateway.

Note: If you wanna expose localhost:80 instead, just do ipns-link expose my-site, because that endpoint is the default endpoint.

Monitor

You can check the list of exposed servers anytime using

ipns-link exposed

Check on the daemon anytime using

ipns-link log

Undo expose if needed

If we need to take our exposed site offline, simply

ipns-link hide my-site

This would only hide my-site and not any other site exposed by the daemon.

Shutdown daemon when done

When you need to shutdown everything, just

ipns-link quit

ipns-link/tutorials/QuickStart.md