This is an example of using Web3.Storage to create a simple image gallery that can be shared with your friends using decentralized web tech like IPFS and Filecoin.

Clone this repository and enter the new directory:

git clone https://github.com/web3-storage/example-image-gallery
cd example-image-gallery

Install dependencies:

npm install

Run the dev server:

npm run dev

Open http://localhost:3000 in your browser.

On the first run, you'll be redirected to http://localhost:3000/settings.html to paste in an API token. If you don't have a token yet, see the Quickstart guide to learn how to get one. The token is saved to your browser's local storage, so you should only need to do this once.

The commands above will run a development server that supports fancy features like hot-reloading when you change the code. This is provided by Vite.js, which also bundles up the site for a production deployment.

If you want to deploy the site somewhere, you can run

npm run build

This will create a dist folder with the compiled site. It will look something like this:

dist
├── assets
│   ├── favicon.17e50649.svg
│   ├── gallery.c6431f3b.js
│   ├── main.af36d20e.js
│   ├── main.b06b9f34.js
│   ├── main.b26a67ee.css
│   ├── settings.ad3ba2b6.js
│   └── vendor.061fb27f.js
├── gallery.html
├── index.html
└── settings.html

The contents of the dist folder can be copied to any static web host, or even published to IPFS and Filecoin using Web3.Storage.

To view the compiled site on your local computer, you'll need to run a basic web server - just opening the .html files in your browser won't work, since it will block the request to load the javascript files thanks to CORS policies.

You can run a simple static HTTP server to preview the build output by running:

npm run serve

You should see something like this:

> [email protected] serve
> vite preview


  vite v2.4.3 build preview server running at:

  > Local: http://localhost:5000/
  > Network: use `--host` to expose

Opening http://localhost:5000 should then take you to the site.

You can upload the compiled site directly to Web3.Storage by running:

export WEB3STORAGE_TOKEN="your-API-token"
npm run deploy

You'll need to replace your-API-token with an API token from Web3.Storage.

The deploy script will output something similar to this:

Loading site files...
Uploading 10 files to Web3.Storage...
Deployed to Web3.Storage!
Root cid:  bafybeifl6l3b4s7hpdm4d32vkh3gwi3cuta7owap3gooxfbrqhp7olx6m4
Gateway url: https://bafybeifl6l3b4s7hpdm4d32vkh3gwi3cuta7owap3gooxfbrqhp7olx6m4.ipfs.dweb.link

This example project is written in "vanilla" JavaScript, HTML and CSS, so there's no UI framework like React or Vue in the mix, just good old document.getElementById and friends.

The JavaScript code uses features from the ES2018 language standard, which is supported by all modern browsers (Internet Explorer officially doesn't count).

There are three HTML pages inside the src directory:

• index.html has the image upload UI
• gallery.html has a carousel that displays your uploaded images
• settings.html has a box to paste your API token into (or delete it)

Each page has a corresponding JavaScript file that it imports a JavaScript module. For example, src/gallery.html imports src/js/gallery.js.

There are also some helpers for DOM manipulation and other common needs in src/js/helpers.js, and the code for interacting with Web3.Storage in src/js/storage.js. Each page imports some code from these common files.

The code that's specific to Web3.Storage lives in `src/js/storage.js.

Images are uploaded in the storeImage function, which takes a File object and some caption text as input.

The storeImage function actually stores two files - we also create a small metadata.json file that includes the caption text and the original filename. Both files are bundled up by Web3.Storage into one IPFS directory listing.

The listImageMetadata function returns an async iterator that will yield metadata about our stored images. This includes the caption we stored, as well as the IPFS Content ID and an IPFS gateway URL to the image.

listImageMetadata uses the list Web3.Storage client method to get metadata about all files stored using Web3.Storage and selects the ones we're interested in by checking their name field for a special string prefix (added in the storeImage method when uploading). Once it has the root CID for each upload, listImageMetadata will fetch the stored metadata.json and yield a metadata object to the calling function.