A bridge to the Dat network for use by browsers. Provides:
This bridge is intended to run with the dat-fox prototype webextension for Firefox.
The helper can be automatically configured for use in Firefox with the installer.sh
script by running the following in a terminal:
curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/sammacbeth/dat-fox-helper/master/installer.sh | bash
To install manually, first download the latest binary release for your OS from here. You should create a folder for the binary as it will place dat files in the library
folder relative to its location. Usual locations are:
~/.local/datfox/
~/Library/Application Support/datfox/
C:\Users\{Your User}\AppData\Roaming\datfox\
On Mac and Linux you will also have to make the binary executable.
# Linux
chmod +x ~/.local/datfox/dat-fox-helper-linux
# Mac
chmod +x ~/.local/datfox/dat-fox-helper-macos
Now we need to make Firefox aware of the binary, using a Native Manifest. Create a JSON file with the following contents:
{
"name": "dathelper",
"description": "Dat helper daemon",
"path": "/home/user/.local/datfox/dat-fox-helper-linux",
"type": "stdio",
"allowed_extensions": [
"{e992d888-6346-4e09-98b5-8c61307970e6}",
"{acc91f3f-2194-4f88-b25a-84ec4ea65683}"
]
}
Update the "path"
value to match the absolute path to the dat-fox-helper binary. Save this file to:
~/.mozilla/native-messaging-hosts/dathelper.json
~/Library/Application Support/Mozilla/NativeMessagingHosts/dathelper.json
regedit
to open the registry editor.HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Mozilla\NativeMessagingHosts
.NativeMessagingHosts
and choose New
-> Key
.dathelper
dathelper
selected, choose the (Default)
entry on the right pane and set the value to be the path to your dathelper.json
.The dat-fox extension will automatically verify if the binary can be automatically launched when it starts up.
On Linux and Mac Firefox can also launch the helper from source. Check out this repository and install dependencies:
git clone git@github.com:sammacbeth/dat-fox-helper.git
cd dat-fox-helper
npm install
Make sure the first line of datfox-helper.js
points to your node
binary. You can check this with which node
in a terminal:
#!/path/to/node
Now complete the steps from the previous section, but instead of using the binary, set the "path"
to point to datfox-helper.js
.