Introduction

Welcome! If you’re new to IPFS, you’ve come to the right place. Here is a quick overview of what IPFS is, how it works, and how to use it. IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data. What does that mean, exactly? Let’s say you’re doing some research on aardvarks. (Just roll with it; aardvarks are cool! Did you know they can tunnel 3 feet in only 5 minutes?

IPFS is a peer-to-peer (p2p) storage network. Content is accessible through peers that might relay information or store it (or do both), and those peers can be located anywhere in the world. IPFS knows how to find what you ask for by its content address, rather than where it is. There are three important things to understand about IPFS Let’s first look at content addressing and how that content is linked together.

Install IPFS If you haven’t done so already, your first step is to install IPFS! Most people prefer to install a prebuilt package, which you can do on the IPFS distributions page by clicking “Install go-ipfs” (our reference implementation written in Go) and then following the instructions for installing from a prebuilt package. Download IPFS for your platform    Don’t want to use the command line right now? You can give the desktop-app implementation of IPFS a go!

What is IPFS? IPFS stands for the InterPlanetary File System - a peer-to-peer network for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data in a distributed file system. To learn more, see this guide on “what is IPFS?”. Where can I see IPFS in action today? https://awesome.ipfs.io/ is a good starting point to see the variety of projects using IPFS today. You can also add your own project here: https://github.