ipfs pinning service api

I still owe you a detailed introduction to IPFS, as promised in my post centralized fragility, and that is on its way.

in the mean time, for those of you who don’t need an introduction, but like me, were not aware of this new feature…

ipfs pinning services api

the ipfs pinning services api allows you to add a remote service, very much like a remote repo in git, and pin local files to a remote service which implements this api.

pinata has been a great choice for pinning service so far. the service is easy to use and has been reliably up since I started using it.

read about the pinning services api spec here.

add pinata thusly:

❯ ipfs pin remote service add pinata https://api.pinata.cloud/psa <your jwt here>

then to pin something:

❯ ipfs pin remote add --service=pinata --name=war-and-peace.txt bafybeib32tuqzs2wrc52rdt56cz73sqe3qu2deqdudssspnu4gbezmhig4

it’s that easy. I lifted the example directly from pinata’s post.

I have been using pinata to host the ipfs version of plantimals.org, and this feature will reduce the amount of toil I have in publishing that version. I still need to re-run hugo and set all links to relative paths, but now I can fully script it without much trouble. previously I found myself needing to log into pinata to execute the upload and remove the old pinned version.

to access the ipfs version of this site, there are several options. the easiest is to use a gateway: https://dweb.link/ipns/plantimals.org. if you are a brave browser user, and you have ipfs support turned on, you can go to ipns://plantimals.org. say something on twitter if you use brave and it worked for you.