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See Other! 😑 → 🤖

A simple service worker for very cachable web3 websites over web2

You want to host your website on IPFS, and you want it to work nicely over https. You set up a dnslink record and point your domain at an IPFS gateway and it all works! RAD!

but look at those cache headers 😑 ...they could be permanent but you playin' (with mutable urls)

If you ask an IPFS gateway to translate a mutable url to the permanent dnslink/cid one, you can't cache the response! What if a service worker transparently redirected all requests to the content addressed version behind the scenes!

The see-other service worker looks up the dnslink for your site and redirects request for https://mysite.com/big.jpg to the cache friendly https://ipfs.io/ipfs/<cid>/big.jpg url. Much like the gateway would do, but by doing it on the client means you can cache the heck out of those responses 👨‍🍳👌✨

With a minor abuse of the Cache api, it handles periodically refreshing the dnslink too.

If you are totally lost, then https://blog.fleek.co/posts/immutable-ipfs is a good primer on permenant vs mutable URLs

Getting started

Warning: ⚠️ a demo of an idea - you should really all be using ipfs-companion ⚠️

  • Copy see-other.js into the root of your static website project. Edit as you see fit.
  • Register the service worker from a script tag or your main js bundle.
if ('serviceWorker' in navigator) {
  navigator.serviceWorker.register('see-other.js');
}

See the example directory. You can run npm start in this project to serve it up.

Why?

  • 🤓 Human friendly document url preserved (e.g. https://blog.ipfs.io).
  • 🤖 Cache friendly CID versioned urls for all subresources with no change to your build process. It's a drop-in improvement.
  • 🧙‍♀️ No magic. Just aligning good old http caching with the permenant web. Your browser will incrementally permenantly cache the resources you fetch. When you update the dnslink, the service worker will update the CID to fetch the subresources from.
  • 🔥 Will make IPFS hosted webites feel fast for folks not yet on the web3 train.
  • 🤝 Less busy work for the gateways. No request is much less work than a 304, when you have to ipfs.get to figure out the answer.

How?

The very first page load will fetch and install the service worker. It will look up the dnslink for your domain, and cache the repsonse.

When you navigate to the next page, the service worker will be in control and all image/css/js requests will be redirected to https://ipfs.io/<current cid from dnslink>/path/to/thing, which come with the permenant cache header.

By the third page view, you are now using the permenanently cached local versions of all resources you've seen before and completly skipping the network requests.

What the hack?

The current dnslink for the site is fetched via https://ipfs.io/api/v0/dns?arg=<current domain> when the service worker starts up. Service workers are stateless and isolated from the DOM, so we can't store the current dnslink in a global variable, nor in localstorage. We do have access to the Cache api, so we save a copy of the dnslink response there, so we dont have to fetch if for every request.

But with great caching comes cache invalidation. We take the simple path and re-check the dnslink periodically. The Cache api preserves the headers of the request, so in theory we could grab the date header from the response and see how old it is. But CORS strikes again! As the dnslink api request is cross-origin, we dont get to see the date header. It's not on the list

However, we can copy the Response and just new up our very own Headers for it, as we just want know how long this entry has been in the cache, so we add a x-cached-at header, and check that on every request to determine when dnslink is too old and we should check again.

Related work

See @gozala's amazing work in getting the real js-ipfs running in a service worker. see-other aims at the other end of that spectum, where you just want a small perf improvement for a IPFS hosted static website.

If you want your browser to do this kind of opportunistic local caching for you for any domain with a dnslink, use ipfs-companion

References

[opaque response]: