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Comment by pythonaut_16 | Hacker News Reader

Is there an nginx/Apache equivalent that can be used for hosting one's own content?

From what I've read I could just run the ipfs-daemon on my VPS/hosting server, but is there a user friendly way where I don't have to manually add every file everytime? How easy is it to host a web page with it?

How will does IPFS handle NAT? Could I host my own pinning server on a Raspberry Pi on my home network?

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I wish there was an easy way to just point it at a folder, but at the moment it seems that you have to manually handle adding the content. If anyone knows of such a solution I'd love to hear about it.

The IPFS daemon handles NAT in much the same way that BitTorrent does: NATed peers will dial out to un-NATed ones to establish a connection. I'm not sure if it also handles UPnP and the like to automatically forward ports if possible.

You could probably write a script to add content from a folder, maybe as part of the deploy process?

Either way, that was the most glaring shortcoming I saw in my brief foray into IPFS. There's lots of talk about pinning services and paying, not much talk about hosting your own pinning service, which was shocking to me since the idea of IPFS is to be decentralized, especially when most of the traditional bandwidth concerns of hosting your own content are mitigated by the P2P aspects.

You can add a folder.

But you still have to do so, either by hand or script.

The `ipfs add` command has a -r recursive flag for adding folders.

Yes, and this is the command that you'd use - in fact, running it from cron every minute is probably a decent solution - but my point is that you have to run something to do so; there isn't a "ipfs add --watch" or so. This isn't even bad; I prefer separated concerns.

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