Distributed Web: Host your website with IPFS clusters, Cloudflare, and Azure DevOps

Static website development for the “Web 3.0”, and optional CI/CD with Azure DevOps

March 13, 2019: This post has been updated for ipfs-cluster 0.10

A huge help in making IPFS more accessible comes from Cloudflare, which just two months ago announced its free IPFS gateway offering through their CDN. Thanks to that, we can get a custom subdomain and point it to a website served via IPFS, and this is all transparent to our end users. 😎

In this article, we’ll start by looking into one part of the Distributed Web, which is hosting static websites. These are web apps written in HTML and JavaScript (with optional use of React, Angular, Vue, Svelte… I could continue ad nauseam here), that are not connected to any database and do not have any server-side processing. If this sounds a bit limiting, well, it is, but at the moment I don’t believe developers and technologists have really figured out a mature, comprehensive, and user-friendly way to build distributed backends. There are many projects attempting to do this (almost all of them based on blockchains), but a winner hasn’t emerged. Regardless, with some creativity and relying on external APIs, you can still build very exciting apps, even without traditional backend servers.

In the rest of this article, I’ll show you how to serve a complete static website using IPFS (with HTML, JavaScript, CSS…