Developer Ecosystem
End User Experience & Adoption
markg85
Web3 enthusiast. Progressing the distributed movement!
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Contribution
Adding IPFS support in CURL took 506 days (see contribution PR link) which landed in the 8.4.0 release. Available as of Oct 11th 2024.
This contribution is two-fold.
1. It allows a user to set an IPFS gateway to use for IPFS URLs (ipfs:// and ipns://). If a local node is installed and running, curl will try and find it's configured gateway without any additional user configuration.
2. It translates IPFS URLs internally to the defined (or detected) gateway thus giving the user a smooth IPFS usage experience without them ever seeing the gateway part of a URL.
These additions to CURL make it accept the IPFS URLs without the need to prefix them with a gateway (a central point of entry).
Contribution links
Impact
Previously users had to specify an IPFS URL like this:
curl https://ipfs.io/ipfs/bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi
That defines a central point of entry (the https://ipfs.io). Ideally you want the user to specify just the IPFS parts, the gateway needs to be a configuration. The changes made in curl 8.4.0 do exactly that. Users can now use an IPFS URL like this:
curl ipfs://bafybeigagd5nmnn2iys2f3doro7ydrevyr2mzarwidgadawmamiteydbzi
The gateway is effectively reduced to a configuration detail. Users of curl now don't need to share the gateway anymore and can instead use plain simple IPFS URLs.
CURL is estimated to be installed at ~20 billion places making this a potential huge impact for IPFS adoption and another step in a more distributed world.
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