can service worker support IPFS?

[LiNk-NY]

Thank you for working on this exciting tech!

I was wondering if it is possible to host a shinylive app via IPFS https://ipfs.tech/ ?

In theory, it should work with a localhost connection?

I am only beginning to understand the infrastructure but in my testing, I get an error that says:

Shinylive uses a Service Worker, which requires either a connection to localhost, or a connection via https.

which seems to come from

// src/load-shinylive-sw.ts
var localhostNames = ["localhost", "127.0.0.1", "[::1]"];
if (window.location.protocol !== "https:" && !localhostNames.includes(window.location.hostname)) {
  const errorMessage = "Shinylive uses a Service Worker, which requires either a connection to localhost, or a connection via https.";
  document.body.innerText = errorMessage;
  throw Error(errorMessage);
}

The URL to the example app looks something like:

http://bafybeidqxcurjbnkahltgppzfwwcp6te2ncz426at3675vbebalxppe454.ipfs.localhost:8080/?filename=index.html

I'm using a native IPFS browser (Brave) connected to a local IPFS node.

Other experiments using Joe Cheng's example (fork here) seem to render only the text:

http://bafybeica5jbha66yt3mq34j4ndbxd74gg4idzfesblc5x3ncqnnvowdjzu.ipfs.localhost:8080/?filename=R-shinylive-demo.html

FWIW, the R-shinylive-demo.html was rendered with the #| standalone: true option.

Is this something that is possible?

Thank you!

[LiNk-NY]

Any updates / comments? @schloerke @jeroen

[georgestagg]

Unfortunately, I don't think this is currently possible.

As described in the error message shown,

Shinylive uses a Service Worker, which requires either a connection to localhost, or a connection via https.

Shinylive works by intercepting network requests using a Service Worker. For security reasons, the service worker API is only enabled by web browsers when connecting to the localhost origin, or when using the https:// protocol.

It looks like from the sample URLs that IPFS servers are using http://. So, to be considered a secure context connections must be through localhost. I'm not 100% sure if these long subdomains of localhost are counted by the browser as a secure context or not, but a stack overflow answer suggests that they do not count and so the Service Worker API cannot be used here.

---

The only thing I can think of that would allow this to work is to explicitly disable the browser security restrictions using command line launch flags. While possible, it is not a real solution as it would require every user to launch a web browser with extra flags and disabling security restrictions in general is a very bad idea. Nevertheless, more information is available on how this can be done for testing purposes.