How I Publish taravancil.com on the Peer-to-Peer Web

Updated August 31, 2018. Originally published on January 4, 2018.

I publish this website on dat:// and https://. As of August 31, 2018, my publishing workflow involves three tools:

1. Hugo, a static site generator
2. The Dat CLI, for publishing updates to the Dat network
3. homebase, for syncing updates from the dat:// version of my website to the https:// version

1. Building my website

This website is a pretty standard static website operation. I use Hugo to generate the markup that composes its pages. I don't have much to say about Hugo other than it works for me. Jekyll seems like a decent static site generator as well.

If you're curious to learn more about how Hugo works, the source for this site is at github.com/taravancil/taravancil.com. Something worth mentioning is that I don't use Hugo's baseURL option and I set canonifyurls = false in my config.toml. This makes it possible to use relative URLs, so whether someone visits the site via dat:// or https://, internal links always follow that protocol choice. For example, an internal link to my blog looks like this:

<a href="/blog">Blog</a>

When I'm ready to publish an update, I run Hugo and it generates a new version of my website in the /public directory.

$ hugo

2. Publishing my website with Dat

I use the Dat CLI to publish and sync updates to my website. You can install dat with npm:

$ npm i -g dat

After generating my website with Hugo, I cd into the /public directory and run the dat command:

$ cd public
$ dat .

The first time I ran the dat command in /public, it created a Dat Archive and minted a new URL. Each subsequent time I run dat in /public, it syncs the updates to the existing URL: dat://4fa30df06cbeda4ae87be8fd4334a61289be6648fb0bf7f44f6b91d2385c9328

3. HTTP mirroring

Currently dat:// is only supported in Beaker, so I need my website to work over https:// too.

Further, dat:// URLs are long and difficult to remember, so it would be nice to be able to access the dat:// version of my site at a shortname like dat://taravancil.com. Luckily, Beaker supports this! Beaker piggybacks off of DNS authentication in combination with the /.well-known convention to enable dat:// shortnames. When you visit dat://taravancil.com in Beaker, it sends a request to https://taravancil.com/.well-known/dat and expects to find a file that looks like this:

dat://4fa30df06cbeda4ae87be8fd4334a61289be6648fb0bf7f44f6b91d2385c9328
TTL=3600

Because Beaker can trust the DNS resolution, Beaker can trust that dat://taravancil.com should point to dat://4fa30df06cbeda4ae87be8fd4334a61289be6648fb0bf7f44f6b91d2385c9328.

homebase

Paul and I built a tool called homebase that provides HTTP mirroring, sets up TLS with Let's Encrypt, and configures dat:// shortnames.

To get started with homebase, you'll need a server with Node.js and npm installed. Something like a Digital Ocean droplet or an EC2 instance will work. You should follow the complete homebase instructions if you decide to use it, but here's a short list of tasks that are easy to forget:

• Configure your DNS records to have A record that points to your server's IP address
• Make sure ports 80 (HTTP), 443 (HTTPS), and 3282 (Dat) are open on your server
• Write a configuration file at ~/.homebase.yml. Here's mine:

dats:
  - url: dat://4fa30df06cbeda4ae87be8fd4334a61289be6648fb0bf7f44f6b91d2385c9328
    domains:
      - taravancil.com
httpMirror: true
letsencrypt:
  email: "contact@taravancil.com"
  agreeTos: true

After installing and configuring homebase and daemonizing the process (I use pm2), your server will do the following:

• Remain active in the peer-to-peer swarm for the dat:// version of your site, so there will always be an active "seeder" hosting its files
• Listen for updates to the dat:// version of your site, and sync them to the directory that composes the https:// version of your site
• Serve the https:// version of your website

Summary

Here's what I do to publish an update to my website:

1. Type some new words on my blog
2. Run hugo in the top-level directory of my website's source
3. cd into /public and run the dat command

That's it! My server automatically syncs the updates using dat:// and the changes are propagated to both dat://taravancil.com and https://taravancil.com within seconds.

Let me know if you try out this workflow! I'm @taravancil on Twitter and I hang out in #beakerbrowser on freenode. I'd love to hear how it goes for you, or offer a helping hand if you run into trouble.