browser-ipfs

Browser friendly ipfs.js light

This is meant to implement the most common use cases for using ipfs in a browser. It has zero dependencies.

It meant to be mostly compatible with ipfs.js with a few key differences:

• no specific support for Buffers. Buffer's still work, see caveat below in documentation for ipfs.cat
• only implements simple add and cat functionality
• Basically if you're using ipfs as a simple KV store, this should do the trick

Run npm install browser-ipfs

Or reference dist/ipfs.min.js inside a <script /> to expose the global ipfs

Example

1) Set IPFS CORS access

   ipfs config --json API.HTTPHeaders.Access-Control-Allow-Origin '["*"]'
   ipfs config --json API.HTTPHeaders.Access-Control-Allow-Methods '["PUT", "GET", "POST"]'
   ipfs config --json API.HTTPHeaders.Access-Control-Allow-Credentials '["true"]'

2) Start IPFS

   ipfs daemon

3) Upload example directory

git clone https://github.com/ConsenSys/ipfs.js && cd ipfs.js

For non-default ipfs configurations, you can run ./example.url to ipfs add -r example and print the local gateway's url

4) Open IPFS gateway

Navigate to the url echoed from ./example.url in the browser, or run ./example.url | xargs open to open it on OSX

Methods

ipfs.setProvider({host: 'localhost', port: '5001'})

• localhost and 5001 are the defaults when calling without arguments
• is also equivalent to ipfs.setProvider({host: '/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/5001'})

ipfs.setProvider(require('ipfs-api')('localhost', '5001'))

ipfs.add(stringOrBuffer, callback)

ipfs.add("Testing...", function(err, hash) {
	if (err) throw err; // If connection is closed
	console.log(hash); 	// "Qmc7CrwGJvRyCYZZU64aPawPj7CJ56vyBxdhxa38Dh1aKt"
});

ipfs.cat(hash, callback)

Since we want to avoid including Buffer as a specific dependency. You need to manually convert the data returned from cat to a Buffer if that is what you're expecting.

ipfs.cat("Qmc7CrwGJvRyCYZZU64aPawPj7CJ56vyBxdhxa38Dh1aKt", function(err, data) { if (err) throw err; console.log(new Buffer(data,'binary').toString()); // "Testing..." });

ipfs.catText(hash, callback)

ipfs.cat("Qmc7CrwGJvRyCYZZU64aPawPj7CJ56vyBxdhxa38Dh1aKt", function(err, text) {
	if (err) throw err;
	console.log(text); 	// "Testing..."
});

new buffer.Buffer(data, 'binary')

ipfs.addJson(json, callback)

ipfs.catJson(hash, callback)