Deploy a private IPFS network in 5 steps

IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) is a peer-to-peer distributed file system that stores and retrieves files in a BitTorrent-like way. The default installation of IPFS connects your machine to the global distributed network. In some cases (privacy, confidentiality) a private IPFS network is preferred over connecting to the public IPFS network.

This article describes the steps to create a private IPFS network on different Ubuntu machines within the same network. Make sure the machines can ping each other.

No connection to the public network will be made, so all the data on this private network will only be accessible to known peers on the network.

For Mac OS, the installation steps are almost identical, just download the Mac versions of Go and IPFS. To install on Windows, you could install Ubuntu from the Microsoft store and follow the steps below.

Step 1 — Install IPFS

Go installation

To install the latest version of IPFS, first Go needs to be installed from https://golang.org/doc/install.

Download the archive to your disk. Then extract the file into /usr/local, creating a Go tree in /usr/local/go with the following example statement. Change the filename in the statement below to the name of your…