Default availability

By default, Distributed Press will make your site available by seeding it to one of the supported protocols after uploading content.

There are then two ways to view this content directly through these protocols:

1. A distributed-web-friendly browser like Opera or Brave can visit the provided links.ipfs.link or links.hyper.link. These look like hyper://docs.distributed.press or ipns://docs.distributed.press. These browsers perform a _dnslink lookup to figure out what that friendly name actually points to content-wise on the protocol and then displays that to the user.
2. Any web browser can visit IPFS or Holepunch Gateway (opens in a new tab) to view the site over regular HTTP. By default, Distributed Press provides links to the gateway URL under links.hyper.gateway and links.ipfs.gateway. These domains default to Hypha (opens in a new tab)'s IPFS and Holepunch gateways. If you self-host Distributed Press, you can manually change these gateway URLs in the code to publicly accessible ones or even your own self-hosted gateway.

You can optionally enable serving over regular HTTP via NGINX (like a normal web server) by either

1. adding the site ID to distribute_press_served_sites in ansible/inventory.yml and re-executing the Ansible Playbook (if you are self-hosting Distributed Press)
2. or contacting the admin of your Distributed Press instance to do the above step for you

Custom Domain

If you'd like your Distributed Site to be available via HTTP at your own custom domain (e.g. like how this site is available over docs.distributed.press), you can do that in one of two ways:

Using a Gateway

If you'd like to serve content from a particular gateway, you can create a CNAME record with your domain registrar that points at the subdomain of the gateway. If the gateway we chose was Hypha's Holepunch gateway (hyper.hypha.coop), the CNAME record for this site would look like CNAME docs.distributed.press. docs-distributed-press.hyper.hypha.coop.

Note that we escape any . in the domain with - and any - with --. Additionally, any gateway you choose should support subdomain gateway resolution (opens in a new tab) this to work properly.

Using NGINX

If you have serving over HTTP enabled for your site (see above for more details), you can create a CNAME record that points at the Distributed Press instance. For instance, the CNAME record for this site would look like CNAME docs.distributed.press. api.distributed.press.