Practical Guide for Archon Cloud
Getting Started
In this practical guide, we will upload data into the Archon Cloud, and then download it. We will then enable this decentralized asset on your website.
Archon Cloud Available Interfaces
Archon Cloud has 4 main interfaces, targeted for different audiences:
- The website interface — simplified feature set; simple UI; no downloads, installation, or programming experience needed
- The Javascript API — simplified feature set; targeted to Javascript developers and applications that need to store relatively small files (<10MB).
- The C++ binary — full feature set; targeted to linux users
- The C++ API — full feature set; targeted to C++ developers
For this guide, we will focus on (1) the website interface. If you are looking to learn more about the other interfaces, additional articles will be coming soon.
Disclaimer
Archon Cloud is still in its early stages, and have not released a mainnet product yet. Currently, we have a beta network that is not fully decentralized. We believe this approach is the most responsible way of rolling out development to the network.
What that means for now, is that most of the servers in the beta test belong to us, and the blockchain validation process is initially decided by a single master node as we test the core infrastructure. We will slowly decentralize our beta network as we do stability tests, stress tests, and so on. This guide will be updated to reflect changes as we add further decentralization to the system over time.
Step 1: Create an Archon Account
First, you have to create an Archon Account by following the steps in this page:
Creating an Archon account involves:
- Creating a username and password locally from your computer (no data transmitted)
! Do not forget your password! There is no recovery available. - Saving the private key file locally to your device
! Do not lose this keyfile! There is no recovery available. - Verifying the prior two steps. Check that your private key works
- Registering your account with Archon.
(Your username, email, and public key will be broadcast to the Archon blockchain at this step; no longer happening on your device)
Note: Archon Accounts are manually screened and approved at this time. It may take up to 24 hours to issuing the account after submitting the request.
Step 2: Upload a file
Uploading a file into Archon Cloud is simplified. You do not need to install anything. Everything can be done in the browser, as long as you have your Archon private key and remember its encryption password.
In order to upload a file into the Archon Cloud under your account, use the following link:
https://www.archon.cloud/gateway/upload.html
You will need the Archon URL (arc://…). The Archon URL is how users can view or download the data, either through one of the API’s or directly in the browser.
Note: The asset filetypes we currently support are javascripts, stylesheets, images, PDFs, JSONs, and text.
Step 3: Retrieve the file from Archon Cloud
- View the file in the browser: https://www.archon.cloud/gateway/view.html
- Downloading the file to disk:
https://www.archon.cloud/gateway/download.html - More advanced: Embed the file in an HTML page
How to Embed an Archon URL into HTML
With Archon Cloud, you can decentralize parts of your web page.
You can inject Archon data into your web page in 2 simple steps.
Step 1: include the Archon JS library
This enables Archon Cloud resources in your web page. To include the Archon JS library, insert this line somewhere in the <head> tags of your HTML page:
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”https://static.archon.cloud/assets/archon.js"></script>
Step 2: Replace Tags
Wherever you would normally insert the asset to the web page:
instead of using “src=”,
use “archon-src=”
instead of using “href=”,
use “archon-href=”
Use the Archon URL instead of the http link.
For example, if you upload an image, dog.jpeg, and it has the Archon URL arc://example.af/dog.jpeg, you would insert it like this:
<img archon-src=“arc://example.af/dog.jpeg”>
That’s it! Your website now utilizes some decentralization.
Conclusion
As you can see, Archon Cloud is pretty simple to use.
It still has a long way to go, but we can glimpse decentralized tech that works right now, and this is the first step towards a future of decentralized storage and a decentralized future.
The Archon team is working hard to continually push the limits of what decentralization can do, and to inspire dapp developers to build better dapps. We’ll equip you with the tools you need to succeed. We think that’s pretty exciting.
More more info, visit us at www.archon.cloud.
For a demo of what you can do if you take this a step further, check out these Wikipedia pages stored decentralizedly, loading live from servers. https://www.archon.cloud/demo-links.html
