Previously, I wrote about an experimental plugin for the IPFS.
Now, I’ve extended this tool with experimental support for serving image proxied content (user icons, unfurled images, etc) via an IPFS CDN, rather than from your local server.
For this to work, your IPFS server needs to be publicly available.
It goes without saying that you need to be running the latest versions of Known for this to work!
Give it a try!
The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a distributed, peer to peer, file system. It’s pretty cool. So, here’s an experimental plugin that adds backend file system support for this protocol for Known.
Currently this functions as a drop in replacement for the Known file storage system, along the same lines as the S3 plugin. It’ll store photos, profile pictures, and any other stored data to IPFS instead of on the local file system, or in Mongo (if you’re using Mongo).
You’ll need an IPFS server to talk to. For development I installed go-ipfs, so you can use that, or one of the public ones.
Next, copy the IPFS directory to your IdnoPlugins
By default, the plugin is set up to talk to localhostconfig.ini
[IPFS] host = 'servername' port = 1234 apiport = 5678
Replace the values accordingly, but make sure you keep the [IPFS] section header.
At the moment, this is a drop in functional replacement for file storage, and doesn’t go into some of the cooler things you can do with Content-Addressable storage.
As pointed out in this ticket, an obvious improvement would be to cache stuff from the image proxy to IPFS (which already takes place), but to directly reference them via their content hash (which doesn’t currently take place), as this should be more efficient.
Anyway, that’s future development and would require some core hooks. I’ll get to that next, I’m sure.
Anyway, kick the tires and let me know your thoughts. Pull requests more than welcome!
