intergalactic/README.md

## Intergalactic

Intergalactic is a client-side gateway to the [IPFS](https://ipfs.io/)
distributed web. After the initial page load and bootstrapping, it pulls
content from IPFS peers entirely in your browser.

### Motivation

Intergalactic brings the distributed web to anyone with a web browser. Web
developers and content producers, simply publish your content through IPFS,
and then bring it to your users with Intergalactic. All without downloads,
software installation, or running IPFS yourself.

### How It Works

Intergalactic automatically installs a JavaScript [service
worker](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Service_Worker_API)
in your browser that intercepts requests to IPFS multihash URLs, and fetches
their content from the IPFS network before rendering in the browser. In other
words, Intergalactic serves as a translation layer between HTTP and IPFS
without needing to go through a central server.

Additionally, Intergalactic treats each IPFS base hash as its own separate
[origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-origin_policy). This helps avoid
cross-site request forgery among IPFS pages, even if they're all served on the
same domain.

## Installation

```shell
npm install
```

TODO

## Usage

### Development

First, run the following from your copy of Intergalactic's source code:

```shell
node server.js
```

Then, enter a URL like `http://localhost:3000/ipfs/<hash>` into your web
browser, where `<hash>` is the IPFS hash of some content on the network.

If the corresponding content is loadable, it will load and render in your
browser.

Open your browser's web console to see what's going on and debug any issues
loading content.


### Production

TODO


### Compatibility

So far, this is only tested in Firefox 57 on Linux. If you have success or
issues on other browsers, please let me know.