Pinning

Once you pin, you win!

Usually in conventional websites; you would have uploaded your website files to the hosting company website. For that would be the place where you had leased/purchased some webspace. As BushFire hosts files directly into the Internet; and not really through any hosting company; you may wonder how on earth would the website actually get into the Internet; and moreover, how will it even get connected to the domain so that anyone can access the website?

That process by which the files of your website lands up on the Internet is called pinning!

This process is done via BushFire using two free, open-source utilities controlled by our utility. So once you click on the "Pin this site!" button, you would notice the Windows CMD window (usually black in color) opening up and pausing. There is magic going on inside that window. Please do NOT close the window as the pinning would become corrupt. Let the process continue and it will automatically close the CMD window that was opened.

NOTE: The pinning process can take a fair amount of time. Please be patient. Make sure that your computer has a good Internet connection during that period. Do NOT close the window that opens up during the pinning action.

BushFire uses the IPFS (Interplanetary File System) to do this pinning magic. It may be too technical to explain the way IPFS works. You can read about it on the Internet. IPFS is basically a unbreakable collection of files that "hang" around on the Internet without really anyone "owning" the space where it is hosted. It is a highly distributed peer-to-peer system. It has stabilized over the years and we are possibly one of the first companies in the world to give a comprehensive webhosting system on top of IPFS.

What is a "QHash" ? We invented this term! It is the code that represents the web root directory contents. IPFS is a content addressing system. You can read all about that on the IPFS website on the Internet, if you so wish. Each unique set of contents would have its own unique QHash.

Pinning without a domain name

Yes, it is possible to pin your website into IPFS, without having any domain associated with the pinned files. In such a case, AFTER the pinning is over; you MUST carefully save the "QHash" that is generated at the end of the pinning process somewhere. Once you have decided on the domain name, and need to configure it -- that QHash is needed. This is explained in another topic in this documentation.

Version History

One beautiful advantage of Pinning is that, each and every version of your website is always available on the Internet. Your domain name would of course be pointing to the latest pinned files. But the earlier one would be available thru the IPFS gateway. There are other gateway points too for IPFS, for example; Cloudflare also gives one.

All you need to do to get the version history, is simply store the QHash that was generated after each pinning. Here is what you can then do: If the Qhash you got for a particular version is Qxyzpqrabc then you can go to that version by constructing a URL address like this: https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/Qxyzpqrabc and then using that link in a browser.