Managing Dedicated Gateways

Filebase users that are on a paid IPFS subscription have access to Filebase Dedicated IPFS Gateways. Dedicated IPFS Gateways are unique compared to other solutions and come with several benefits, such as:

Increased performance and retrieval times.
No rate limits when accessing content through the dedicated gateway.
Limiting content (whitelisting) that the gateway can serve through the Scope feature of a dedicated gateway.
Setting a Root CID of the gateway that can be used for website or app hosting.

With Filebase, you are able to create public, private, and scoped gateways.

Public: The gateway can serve any public CID, even ones not pinned by Filebase.
Private: The gateway can only serve CID's that are pinned by Filebase.
Scoped: The gateway is tied to a bucket and can only serve content from that specific bucket. Any CIDs for content not stored in the specified bucket will return a 404 Not Found message.

Filebase Dedicated IPFS Gateways of any type do not have any request limits.

Filebase IPFS Dedicated Gateways are a feature only available to paid users. They are not available for users on the free tier.

Creating a Dedicated Gateway

Navigate to the Gateways page on the Filebase web console.

Select the ‘Create Gateway’ button in the upper right corner.

A new window will open prompting you to provide a gateway name and select the gateway’s access level.

Gateway names are subject to the same naming restrictions as bucket names. All gateway names must be lowercase, between 3-63 characters, and must be unique.

Gateways can be public, private, or scoped.

Public Mode

To create a public gateway, select ‘Public’. This can be changed after the gateway has been created.

Private Mode

To create a private gateway, select ‘Private’. This can be changed after the gateway has been created.

Scoped Gateways

To create a scoped gateway, select ‘Private’, then select a bucket name from the drop-down menu for the scoped gateway to serve. Scoped gateways only serve content located in the bucket that they are restricted to.

Note: If a gateway is configured to serve a root CID, it cannot also be configured to be restricted to a bucket. The root CID configuration must be cleared to configure a bucket restriction.

Alternatively, if you want to set a bucket restriction for a gateway that was previously created, you can set the restriction by navigating to the Buckets menu and selecting the three menu dots for the bucket you’d like to restrict your gateway to. Then select ‘Set Restriction’.

When prompted, select the gateway you want configured to use the selected bucket.

Removing a Bucket Restriction

To remove the bucket restriction on a gateway, navigate to the Gateways page, select the three menu dots on the right-hand side, then select Clear Bucket Restrictions

You will be prompted to confirm the removal.

Interacting With Gateways

Once a gateway has been created, a subdomain record is created that points to your dedicated gateway. For example, the dedicated gateway called documentation will use the gateway URL:

https://documentation.myfilebase.com/

Toggling Private/Public Access

To toggle between public and private access for a dedicated gateway, use the toggle switch that functions identically to the public and private access toggle switch for buckets.

To interact with the gateway, you can select the three menu dots to open a list of options.

To open the gateway URL, select Open.

By default, the URL will return the following webpage:

This webpage is returned since there is no CID included in the URL. However, gateways can be configured to serve a CID or file as its root. This means instead of this default webpage, you can configure a different default static webpage or another file to be viewed by default rather than this error message.

This is most commonly used to serve static websites from a domain. Using this feature, http://documentation.myfilebase.com/ would return the file you selected, without having to enter a CID or path in the URL.

Setting a CID as the Root of the Dedicated Gateway

Note: If a gateway is configured to be restricted to a bucket, it cannot be configured to have a root CID. The bucket restriction configuration will need to be cleared before a root CID can be configured for the gateway.

To configure this, navigate to the Buckets menu, and select an IPFS bucket.

Once inside the bucket, select the file you’d like to set as the root file by selecting the three menu dots on the right-hand side.

Select Set as Root.

Then choose the dedicated gateway you’d like to use.

Now, when you open the gateway, you’ll see the file you set as the root file displayed rather than the default error message.

Removing a Root CID From a Gateway

To remove a CID set as the root CID for a dedicated gateway, navigate to the Gateways page, then select the three menu dots and select Clear Root CID.

You will be prompted to confirm the removal.