Host Your Site Under Your Domain on IPFS

This is a step-by-step tutorial for hosting your website under your domain on IPFS, from zero, on a DigitalOcean Ubuntu 16.04.3 x64 Droplet (i am using the $10 variant with 2GB RAM).

Install IPFS

First, make sure the system is up to date, and install tar and wget:

apt-get update
apt-get install tar wget

Get the latest IPFS binary and install it:

wget https://dist.ipfs.io/go-ipfs/v0.4.14/go-ipfs_v0.4.14_linux-amd64.tar.gz
tar xfv go-ipfs_v0.4.14_linux-amd64.tar.gz
cp go-ipfs/ipfs /usr/local/bin/

It’s usually not a good idea to run a public-facing service as root. So create a new user account to run IPFS and switch to it:

adduser ipfs
su ipfs

Initialize IPFS:

ipfs init --profile=server

Now you could start the IPFS daemon with ipfs daemon &, but what you really want is that it automatically starts when the server boots.

Switch back to the root user:

exit

Allow the ipfs user to run long-running services by enabling user lingering for that user:

loginctl enable-linger ipfs

Create the file /etc/systemd/system/ipfs.service with this content:

[Unit]
Description=IPFS daemon

[Service]
User=ipfs
Group=ipfs
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/ipfs daemon --enable-gc
Restart=on-failure

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable and start the service:

systemctl enable ipfs
systemctl start ipfs

Now IPFS should be up and running, and start when the server boots.

You should see peers pouring in:

su ipfs
ipfs swarm peers

Add your website to IPFS

Now that you have IPFS running on your server, add your website.

ipfs add -r <path>

This adds all contents of the folder at <path> to IPFS, recursively. You should see output similar to this:

added QmcrBxpSJ8if6Uy7yZbtyXXsPuUmvT5KKfZKQi39kVJ5aW <folder>/images/fritz.png
added QmauwH6KDTGaTeAdQJbW9wZEGczjzSu9EceeasPUXo2qz9 <folder>/index.html
added Qmd9JiiVRTyyY1Tn2CWDLrkqqKFaMiwaAvAASTE88yyXAC <folder>/images
added QmaFrmEDFJXnYJb9hCrKDGs8XVvSUALzhv297W3uP97v2Y <folder>

Take note of the last multi-hash (here: QmaFrmED..., yours will be different).

Your website is now added to IPFS. You can view it on the ipfs.io gateway now: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmaFrmED.... Or on your local one at localhost:8080. Or on any other gateway.

Repeat this procedure every time you change content in your website.

Set up DNS

Go to https://cloud.digitalocean.com/networking/domains/ and add your domain. Below we assume this domain is example.com, just replace that with you actual domain.

Add A records (and AAAA records if you want to support IPv6) for both your main domain example.com and the subdomain ipfs.example.com. The latter will be proxied to your local IPFS gateway so that it is publicly accessible.

Also add a TXT record for example.com, with the content dnslink=/ipfs/QmaFrmED....

Update the TXT record with the new multi-hash every time you change content in your website.

DNS records take a while to propagate, so be patient.

Install nginx with Let's Encrypt SSL certs

Make sure the system is up to date, and install nginx:

apt-get update
apt-get install nginx

Edit /etc/nginx/sites-available/default. Change its contents to this:

server {
    server_name example.com ipfs.example.com;
    server_tokens off;

    listen 80;
    listen [::]:80;
    listen 443 ssl;
    listen [::]:443 ssl;

    location / {
        proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
        proxy_http_version 1.1;
        proxy_set_header Upgrade $http_upgrade;
        proxy_set_header Connection 'upgrade';
        proxy_set_header Host $host;
        proxy_cache_bypass $http_upgrade;
    }
}

This will proxy all requests to example.com and ipfs.example.com to your IPFS gateway running at localhost:8080.

Test your configuration:

nginx -t

If everything is okay, reload nginx:

systemctl reload nginx

Install Certbot:

add-apt-repository ppa:certbot/certbot
apt-get update
apt-get install python-certbot-nginx

Run Certbot to get your SSL certificates. Certbot supports nginx, and will update your configuration file automatically.

certbot --nginx -d example.com -d ipfs.example.com

Certbot will ask you to choose whether HTTPS access is required or optional (select the Secure option).

To harden security, update Diffie-Hellman parameters:

openssl dhparam -out /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem 2048

Include this file somewhere in the server block of your nginx configuration /etc/nginx/sites-available/default, like this:

server {
    ...
    ssl_dhparam /etc/ssl/certs/dhparam.pem;
    ...
}

Again, test your configuration:

nginx -t

If everything is okay, reload nginx:

systemctl reload nginx

Let's Encrypt certificates expire after 90 days, so you should have means in place to update them automatically. Crontabs are a good way to do that:

crontab -e

Add the following line to the end of the file:

15 3 * * * /usr/bin/certbot renew --quiet

This will run certbot renew --quiet every day at 3:15am. It checks if the certificates expire soon (in 30 days or less), and if they do, renews them.

Now if you go to https://example.com, you should see the website you added to IPFS above.

Sources

Additional Info

Safely running a public IPFS gateway using nginx (shows how to prevent download of arbitrary, non-endorsed content via your IPFS gateway)
Publishing a blog on IPFS (Jekyll, posts hosted on GitHub, Travis CI)

arth2o/ipfs-server-setup.md