Tutorial Series: Setting up an IPFS peer

A series of step-by-step technical guides for getting started with IPFS

1. How to quickly (and inexpensively) spin up a cloud-based IPFS peer and start connecting to the distributed web
2. How to set up a reverse proxy with NGINX and IPFS to support secure connections with browser ĐApps
3. Making sense of the many IPFS configuration options
4. Peeking under the hood of IPFS daemon profiles

The Interplanetary File System (IPFS) is a distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files. In some ways, it is similar to the original aims of the Web: a decentralized network of devices connected by a set of protocols designed to facilitate the sharing of cat photos. But seriously, we’ve already talked a fair bit about IPFS and how it is poised to change the way the Internet works, so I won’t rehash those points again here. We’re big fans, and have even built our core technology — Textile Photos — on top of IPFS. Suffice to say, it is an exciting project with huge potential, and a distributed network of IPFS ‘peers’ that is growing by the day.

While large projects such as IPFS, Filecoin, and the protocols that drive them are sometimes backed by large-scale investments, the open source communities that they support are always in need of some help. This is doubly true for communities based around networking protocols, which rely on a working network of peers. A Textile, we’ve already added several of our own peers to the network, and are continuing to explore new ways to bring the next million peers online. But we always need folks to join us. Which brings us to the purpose of this tutorial series…

Like most networks, IPFS grows in value, staying power, and in many ways, utility, by adding more nodes to the network.

We’d like to make it as easy as possible to join the distributed web. And while IPFS and its various technologies are evolving rapidly , they are also still relatively new, which means things aren’t always as user-friendly as we’d like them to be. So in this series, we’re going to take you from complete noob to interplanetary expert in a series of easy to follow, step-by-step guides.

We started this tutorial series with an initial post on “how to quickly spin up a cloud-based IPFS peer and start connecting to the distributed web”, and it quickly grew into a longer, ongoing Tutorial Series. This post aggregates these tutorials to a single point of entry, to help guide new users through the series.

We hope this series provides some useful guides for those looking to get started with IPFS specifically, and the distributed web more generally. While you’re here, why not check out some of our other stories, or sign up for our Textile Photos waitlist to see what we’re building with IPFS, or even drop us a line and tell us what cool distributed web projects you’re working on — we’d love to hear about it!