HTTP DNSLink Gateway Specification
DNSLink alone tells nobody how a browser request actually turns into a served HTML page. The DNSLink Gateway spec is the contract between your DNS records and the gateway that browsers hit — required reading if you operate a custom gateway for user sites under a wildcard like `*.dial.wtf`.
What It Defines
Defines how an HTTP gateway uses the inbound `Host` header to look up `_dnslink.<host>` TXT records and serve the resolved IPFS/IPNS content as a normal website at the root of that host. This is the spec that makes `https://mysite.example.com/about` Just Work for a browser when `mysite.example.com` is CNAMEd to a DNSLink-aware gateway and `_dnslink.mysite.example.com` contains `dnslink=/ipfs/bafy…`. The gateway resolves the TXT record, fetches the CID, and returns HTML/CSS/JS exactly as if it were hosting the site directly.
Canonical (Normative)
Convenient (Practical)
Open community of implementers (Protocol Labs, Shipyard, Boost, Helia, Kubo, and others) that maintains the InterPlanetary File System spec family at specs.ipfs.tech. Publishes content-addressing primitives (CID, Multihash, Multibase, Multiaddr), the IPLD data model, naming systems (IPNS, DNSLink), and the HTTP Gateway specs (Path, Subdomain, Trustless, DNSLink) that bridge content-addressed storage to ordinary browsers.
Related Specs
DNSLink is how you give an IPFS/IPNS deployment a stable human URL like `mysite.example.com` while the underlying CID changes every release. If you ever host static sites, agent artifacts, or signed manifests on IPFS and want a normal-looking domain, this is the spec.
Path gateways are how a regular browser without IPFS support fetches content-addressed data. Knowing the spec is required to operate a self-hosted gateway, debug 404/range/CORS issues, or build clients that fall back from native IPFS to HTTP gateways.
Path gateways break the web origin model — every CID shares the gateway origin. Subdomain gateways are the production-correct choice for hosting independent sites. This is also the only model that makes single-page apps with cookies and Service Workers function on a public gateway.
The record types (A, MX, TXT, CNAME) you configure in every DNS panel live in this spec. Know what you're setting.
This is the core contract of every web API, browser request, and server response. You can't design or debug HTTP without knowing this.