Dat’s the way I like it

I committed to supporting a decentralised peer-to-peer web by serving my site over dat:// as well as https://. Since starting this I have been stumped as to how to make my url over dat:// friendly, because dat://59278ae8cc9d27492b4a0a5d4392ff3c913aebd8fa079760ce732f26b70c4eef (open in BeakerBrowser) is just mean.

I could see other sites had achieved this. Beaker’s own site does exactly what I wanted with dat://beakerbrowser.com/ (open in BeakerBrowser).

I read several docs about it and kept getting confused to the point that I’d give up, hoping to return later with a fresh mind and try again.

Eventually, I have succeeded and it is ridiculously easy so I’ll share a simple step-by-step guide so you don’t have to do through the same pain.

1. Create a folder called .well-known in the root of your https:// served directory.
2. Create a file called dat in that folder.
3. Add the following code to that file, replacing {key} with the mega long dat URL key to your site. Fe, dat://59278ae8cc9d27492b4a0a5d4392ff3c913aebd8fa079760ce732f26b70c4eef

     dat://{key}
     TTL=60

4. Save and upload to wherever you host your https:// site.
5. Now, visit your site in BeakerBrowser but use dat:// instead of https:// as the URL and automagically it works 🎉