The Walrus Sites portal

We use the term "portal" to indicate any technology that is used to access and browse Walrus Sites. As mentioned in the overview, we foresee three kinds of portals:

  1. server-side portals;
  2. custom local apps; and
  3. service-worker based portals in the browser.

Currently, only a server-side portal is served at https://walrus.site.

Hosting of the service worker

In the past, the service-worker based portal was hosted at https://walrus.site and the server-portal at https://blob.store. This is no longer the case.

The service-worker portal is no longer hosted, but you can still run it locally. Its code is available in the walrus-sites repository. For more information, see running the portal locally.

The old domain, blob.store is currently an alias for walrus.site but will be removed in the future.

Walrus Sites stable branch

The stable branch of Walrus Sites is testnet.

Configuring the portal

There are two main locations where the portal needs to be configured: The constants.ts file and the environment variables.

You can find the constants.ts file in the portal/common/lib directory. It holds key configuration parameters for the portal. Typically, you won't need to modify these, but if you do, here are the explanations for each parameter:

  • NETWORK: The Sui network to be used for fetching the Walrus Sites objects. Currently, we use Sui testnet.
  • AGGREGATOR: The URL of the aggregator from which the portal will fetch the Walrus blobs.
  • SITE_PACKAGE: The Sui object ID of the Walrus Sites package.
  • MAX_REDIRECT_DEPTH: The number of redirects the portal will follow before stopping.
  • SITE_NAMES: Hard coded name: objectID mappings, to override the SuiNS names. For development only. Use this at your own risk, may render some sites with legitimate SuiNS names unusable.

Next, the environment variables are set in the .env.local. To just run a simple instance of the portal, you can just use the environment variables specified in the .env.example file.

cp ./portal/server/.env.example ./portal/server/.env.local

Likewise, if you want to run the service-worker portal, you can copy the .env.example file to .env.local in the portal/worker directory.

cp ./portal/worker/.env.example ./portal/worker/.env.local

Running the portal locally

You can run a portal locally if you want to browse Walrus Sites without accessing external portals or for development purposes.

This requires having the pnpm tool installed. To start, clone the walrus-sites repo and enter the portal directory.

Make sure you are on the stable branch:

git checkout testnet

cd portal
bun install
# Build the portal you want to use, or both
bun build:server
bun build:worker

to install the dependencies, and then either one of the following commands:

# Serve the server-side portal
bun run server

# Serve the service-worker portal
bun run worker

to serve one of the portals. Typically, you will find it served at localhost:3000 (for the server side portal) or localhost:8080 for the service worker (but check the output of the serve command).