Pinning content

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The concept of pinning is a fundamental core feature of IPFS. By pinning an object to your node, you start serving that content to the network, increasing its availability and resilience.

Pinning manually in the browser

Within a browsing tab, you can manually pin a page with the PIN tool button at the far right, which allows single or recursive pinning.

  • Pin (single) will pin only the IPFS object representing the current page
  • Pin (recursive) will pin the IPFS object (current page, which can be a directory node) recursively
  • Pin parent (recursive) will pin the parent of the current object recursively (can be useful if you are browsing a file and want to pin the parent directory recursively).
  • Pin page’s links will pin the IPFS objects referenced in the current page’s HTML code

You will get a system tray notification when the pinning is complete.

Automatic pinning

You can also activate the automatic pinning with the Automatic PIN switch button. When it’s activated, all pages visited in this browsing session will be automatically pinned to your IPFS node.

In the application’s toolbar, next to the clipboard manager, another switch button activates application-wide automatic pinning.

Pinning status

In the status bar (at the bottom of the window), the pinning status icon gives information about the status of the pinning queues. Clicking on it gives a view of the objects being pinned.