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Gateway

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.

Local gateway

By default, Kubo nodes run a path gateway at http://127.0.0.1:8080/ and a subdomain gateway at http://localhost:8080/

Additional listening addresses and gateway behaviors can be set in the config file.

Public gateways

Protocol Labs provides a public gateway at https://ipfs.io (path) and https://dweb.link (subdomain). If you've ever seen a link in the form https://ipfs.io/ipfs/Qm..., that's being served from our gateway.

There is a list of third-party public gateways provided by the IPFS community at https://ipfs.github.io/public-gateway-checker/

Configuration

The Gateway.* configuration options are (briefly) described in the config documentation, including a list of common gateway recipes.

Debug

The gateway's log level can be changed with this command:

> ipfs log level core/server debug

Directories

For convenience, the gateway (mostly) acts like a normal web-server when serving a directory:

  1. If the directory contains an index.html file:
  2. If the path does not end in a /, append a / and redirect. This helps avoid serving duplicate content from different paths.†
  3. Otherwise, serve the index.html file.
  4. 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

Static Websites

You can use an IPFS gateway to serve static websites at a custom domain using DNSLink. See Example: IPFS Gateway for instructions.

Filenames

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 (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.

Downloads

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:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmfM2r8seH2GiRaC4esTjeraXEachRt8ZsSeGaWTPLyMoG?filename=hello_world.txt&download=true

Response Format

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.

Content-Types

application/vnd.ipld.raw

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.

application/vnd.ipld.car

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.

Deprecated Subset of RPC API

For legacy reasons, the gateway port exposes a small subset of RPC API under /api/v0/. While this read-only API exposes a read-only, "safe" subset of the normal API, it is deprecated and should not be used for greenfield projects.

Where possible, leverage /ipfs/ and /ipns/ endpoints. along with application/vnd.ipld.* Content-Types instead.