About my experience trying to publish my website to 0xferrous.eth.limo

The Problem

You want to deploy your static site automatically to IPFS via CI/CD pipeline like github actions.

Some context

IPFS is a decentralized open protocol for storing and serving data over a peer-to-peer network.

IPNS is a mutable pointer to a content hash on IPFS. It is necessary and useful to use IPNS for providing static links to users that work even when you update the content of your files. Since the CID is a hash of the file content, it keeps changing as the content changes.

eth.limo is an HTTPS gateway that reads ENS records to get the content hash and uses it to serve the content at <ens-name>.eth.limo, making decentralized websites accessible from regular browsers without special extensions or configuration.

So, the way to serve a website on IPFS is by uploading the whole static build of the website, usually something like build/ or public/ folder to IPFS, use the CID of the root folder and update your IPNS to point to the new CID on every update.

For continuous deployment from your github actions, it will automate this whole process.

State of the art

There are not many github actions that can do ipfs deployment, etc. in a simple to use interface.

I used claude to generate me a github action that uploads my build folder to ipfs and also pin it at the same time using the pinata api. However, after I completed the integration, I realized pinata didn't support IPNS management.

So I had to look for another solution and found filebase. They provide IPNS management/integration via their API. So I ended up keeping using pinata for pinning the content, but using filebase for updating the IPNS to the new CIDs.

You can find the code related to this and example github action usage in my own workflow:

1. The actions code
2. The workflow code is like the following snippet:

   - name: IPFS publishing, pinning and IPNS update
     uses: ./.github/actions/pinata-upload
     with:
       pinata-jwt: ${{ secrets.PINATA_JWT }}
       build-location: './public'
       ipns-name: ${{ secrets.IPNS_NAME }}
       filebase-access-key: ${{ secrets.FILEBASE_ACCESS_KEY }}
       filebase-secret-key: ${{ secrets.FILEBASE_SECRET_KEY }}
   

So, with all this setup, I set the content hash on my ENS 0xferrous.eth which now allows me to serve this website using the eth.limo service making the website available on web2 internet and browsers at https://0xferrous.eth.limo.

You can set the content hash on the ENS frontend under the records tab.

Security Considerations

I am using filebase for IPNS management, which means they are managing the key that does the signing of the IPNS record. So, if they are compromised, 0xferrous.eth.limo can be made to point to something else and malicious. But, for now, this works.