An IPFS Gateway acts as a bridge between traditional web browsers and IPFS. Through the gateway, users can browse files and websites stored in IPFS as if they were stored in a traditional web server.
More about Gateways and addressing IPFS on the web.
Kubo's Gateway implementation follows ipfs/specs: Specification for HTTP Gateways.
By default, Kubo nodes run
a path gateway at http://127.0.0.1:8080/
and a subdomain gateway at http://localhost:8080/.
The path one also implements trustless gateway spec
and supports trustless responses as opt-in via Accept header.
Additional listening addresses and gateway behaviors can be set in the config file.
Protocol Labs provides a public gateway at
https://ipfs.io (path),
https://dweb.link (subdomain),
and https://trustless-gateway.link (trustless only).
If you've ever seen a link in the form https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qm..., that's being served from a public goods gateway.
There is a list of third-party public gateways provided by the IPFS community at https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/
The Gateway.* configuration options are (briefly) described in the
config
documentation, including a list of common gateway recipes.
The gateway's log level can be changed with this command:
> ipfs log level core/server debug
For convenience, the gateway (mostly) acts like a normal web-server when serving a directory:
- If the directory contains an
index.htmlfile: - If the path does not end in a
/, append a/and redirect. This helps avoid serving duplicate content from different paths.† - Otherwise, serve the
index.htmlfile. - Dynamically build and serve a listing of the contents of the directory.
†This redirect is skipped if the query string contains a
go-get=1 parameter. See PR#3964
for details
You can use an IPFS gateway to serve static websites at a custom domain using DNSLink. See Example: IPFS Gateway for instructions.
When downloading files, browsers will usually guess a file's filename by looking
at the last component of the path. Unfortunately, when linking directly to a
file (with no containing directory), the final component is just a CID
(bafy.. or Qm...). This isn't exactly user-friendly.
To work around this issue, you can add a filename=some_filename parameter to
your query string to explicitly specify the filename. For example:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmfM2r8seH2GiRaC4esTjeraXEachRt8ZsSeGaWTPLyMoG?filename=hello_world.txt
When you try to save above page, you browser will use passed filename instead of a CID.
It is possible to skip browser rendering of supported filetypes (plain text,
images, audio, video, PDF) and trigger immediate "save as" dialog by appending
&download=true:
An explicit response format can be requested using ?format=raw|car|.. URL parameter,
or by sending Accept: application/vnd.ipld.{format} HTTP header with one of supported content types.
Majority of resources can be retrieved trustlessly by requesting specific content type via Accept header or ?format=raw|car|ipns-record URL query parameter.
See trustless gateway specification and verifiable retrieval documentation for more details.
Returns a byte array for a single raw block.
Sending such requests for /ipfs/{cid} allows for efficient fetch of blocks with data
encoded in custom format, without the need for deserialization and traversal on the gateway.
This is equivalent of ipfs block get.
Returns a CAR stream for specific DAG and selector.
Right now only 'full DAG' implicit selector is implemented. Support for user-provided IPLD selectors is tracked in https://github.com/ipfs/kubo/issues/8769.
This is a rough equivalent of ipfs dag export.
Only works on /ipns/{ipns-name} content paths that use cryptographically signed IPNS Records.
Returns IPNS Record in Protobuf Serialization Format which can be verified on end client, without trusting gateway.