Server Hosted Blockstack Browser

Support
#1

I’d like to setup an instance of the Blockstack browser on my local server and then browse via the server from all my home devices (e.g., laptop, desktop, and phone.)…any thoughts?

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#2

I’m not sure there’s a way to do this. But what you could do is run a full node on your local server so you’d have faster, guaranteed access to BNS and Atlas. Any thoughts from @jude?

#3

We have something like this at browser.blockstack.org. I’m not sure where the install instructions are, but @aaron or @larry will know.

#4

Running a self hosted browser is pretty straight forward.

You’d run npm run prod-webapp and then set a server up to serve the contents of the resulting build/ directory.

That’s what we do for browser.blockstack.org

#5

From my experience as an ordinary user my thoughts:

  1. If you setup the blockstack browser on your server you still have to setup you blockstack keys for each device because it is the user agent/firefox/chrome that keeps them, not the blockstack browser web app.Are you looking for a solution where you don’t have to setup each device? Not clear what you are looking for.

  2. Furthermore, you have to handle the login requests from apps that try to open blockstack on localhost:8888 in some way. Not sure what is good practice here. This seems to be a general issue of protocol handler registration. What if my browser is listening on localhost:9999?

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#6

Yes - re-reading I’m also not sure what the parent is looking for.

My comments only address how we set up browser.blockstack.org - having apps authenticate with it requires modifying the platform apps to send blockstack: sign in requests to your instance. As @friedger points out, this doesn’t solve the problem of having to replicate your state on each browser-platform combination.

#7

I apologize for any ambiguity, I see this is more complex than I was initially thinking.

Background: I have a Chromebook with Linux Beta (debian VM) running along side Chrome OS. When I run the Blockstack browser from the Linux VM a Google Chrome browser is started on my Chrome OS side pointing to localhost:8888 (i.e., pointing to the Chrome OS localhost not the Linux VM localhost). This got me thinking about the possibilities of hosting a single instance of the Blockstack browser on a server and listening on x.x.x.x:8888 vice localhost.

  1. Is it possible to have the Blockstack browser run as a service?
  2. What configurations are required on end devices for this to work?
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