IPFS Gateway Redirect Chrome Extension

Now we can share gateway.ipfs.io urls around and still use IPFS in a distributed fashion. Plus those not in the know or with a broken build will still have everything work fine for them. Yay! =)

Chrome Store: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/gifgeigleclkondjnmijdajabbhmoepo
Best version: https://github.com/dylanPowers/ipfs-chrome-extension/releases/tag/v0.4.1

What's it do?

It intercepts requests to http://gateway.ipfs.io/(ipfs|ipns)/<hash> on the fly and redirects them to the ipfs gateway you have running locally. By default this is localhost:8080 but it can be configured to any server of your choosing. It also adds a context menu option and url bar icon that allow you to easily copy IPFS urls. This fixes urls so that they have the host correctly set to gateway.ipfs.io rather than localhost:8080. The url bar (aka Omnibox) icon requires a simple click to copy the IPFS url, and links require a right click and where you would normally select "Copy link address" instead select "Copy as IPFS link".

Extra features of the Github release version:

• File access - simply type /ipfs/QmZSnfkEfjowAAMVJoq2LmZJqdpT4uK6EtrcoWLqkMR4UY
• HTTPS access - works for resources, like cat pictures, found on https pages.
• IPNS domain name redirection - type ipfs.git.sexy and get redirected to /ipns/ipfs.git.sexy

About Domain Redirection

This feature is disabled by default as it can have a negative impact on browser performance in certain instances. Those instances are rare, but they do happen. Note that with this option enabled, for every domain the browser makes a request to, this extension is also making a request to your ipfs daemon to see if a request to /ipns/<domain> would succeed or fail.

Privacy Considerations

Go ahead and read the comments on issue #5.

Github Release Version

Why is this not on the Chrome store?

The Chrome store is more restrictive when it comes to file URI's and requires those permissions to be listed as optional. Unfortunately, due to the issues I found in #4 optional permissions are impossible to use in this app. Therefore I figured I might as well leave that version as it is and have the version listed here be the more powerful version.

How To Install

Open up chrome://extensions and drag-n-drop the crx file onto the page. If that doesn't work because Chrome is being strange (it's happened to me a few times), you can enable developer mode, unzip the zipped version to a safe location and click "Load unpacked extension...".

You will also have to click the checkbox that says "Allow access to file URLs" that's present for the extension on the chrome://extensions page.

Building

You can probably see that this is implemented in Dart, and running it requires the Dart SDK. If you also grab Dartium (Chromium + Dart VM), running it is as simple as loading the ext directory directly into Dartium by opening a tab to chrome://extensions and following the instructions at https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/getstarted#unpacked. To run the extension in a standard Chrome browser, you'll have to first compile it to Javascript. To make a Javascript build simply run:

pub build ext --mode debug  ## Default mode is production which minifies the JS

The build will output to build/ext for which you can load it from.