Redirect endpoint as transition strategy

[Kubuxu]

As transition solution for sites switching from normal HTTP to IPFS and not wanting to stay under own domain it would be great to have IP/HTTP endpoint that returns 301 Moved Permanently to correct ipfs.io/ipns/....

Example of operation:

GET /blog/index.html HTTP/1.1
Host: www.example.org

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: https://ipfs.io/ipns/www.example.org/blog/index.html

It is nice as browser plug-in then can redirect that to local gateway.

Problem with it is that it requires additional IPv4 address but as it is used only very rarely performance nor latency isn't an issue. It would require only one or two additional address (two just for fallback if one goes down for maintenance).

It would also allow sites to migrate to IPFS and tools do not have to know about it. Current strategy is setting A records but this can be problematic (infrastructure changes, endpoint version changes).

[lidel]

I think that what you described here is already possible via dnslink and gateway API.
Browser plugins can query DNS API (provided by go-ipfs) and redirect to IPFS if a site has dnslink record present.

See ipfs/ipfs-companion#44 if you are interested in details / progress of Firefox implementation.