Preview - Improved Asset Canisters

Developers
#1

Announcing Improved Asset Canisters

We have released a preview build of a new DFX feature that I personally am very excited for: support for large files in asset canisters powered by HTTP requests!

TLDR - we have released a preview build of a new minor version of DFX, 0.7.0-beta.2, that will upgrade our current asset canister model to one that allows you to serve arbitrary static assets, and removes the 2MB limit.

Read about the new feature here: Announcing Improved Asset Canisters

Note - I would have preferred to post directly on the forum, but Cloudflare was blocking me from posting the code snippets here.

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Can we somehow achieve or build a canister with a interface bahaving like a classic web server
#2

Let’s gooooo ! Will try it asap

#3

Hi @kpeacock

Where can I always find the latest docs on the frontend limitations etc? I was looking for the documentation for the 2mb max file size and none own index.html and luckily found this announcement :slight_smile:

Would be nice to figure this things out myself through the docs, if there are any limitations or anything that might be relevant like that.

Thank you very much!

#4

The docs are being overhauled for the latest releases, these shouldn’t be long now. It was all hands on deck getting things ready for genesis but things are catching up now and will be back in sync.

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#5

All of the examples I have seen so far are using Gatsby. I’m interested to try deploying a static site built using 11ty.

I have my NNS account fuelled with ICP and I’m ready to go. I’m going to wait until the docs are published before diving in.

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#6

Something else I was wondering about (which I’m sure will be covered in the docs) is the possibility of pointing domain names at canisters. I assume this will be possible.

#7

Yes this will be possible.

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#8

This post is still relevant about onboarding to the mainnet, but we should be ready soon. IMPORTANT: Updates on Sodium and Beta Mainnet

The first section of my blog post should be useful for any tooling that outputs to a build directory that can be hosted. Gatsby just happens to be my favorite.

Custom DNS is coming, but we had to push it back in favor of more critical stuff for launch

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#9

Gatsby is cool, but for the leanest, meanest, most accessible static sites, I have fallen for 11ty. I’m looking forward to running some web vitals testing to see how Canister hosted sites stack up against the likes of Netlify.

There are so many interesting projects that I would like to experiment with. Once I have basic site hosting working I’m interested to experiment with using Canisters to take the place of traditional JavaScript serverless functions for things like email processing and even dynamic page generation.

#10

Those are two of my favorite “if I have time” ideas, so I’m looking forward to seeing what you do!

We will need formal oracles set up for a full-fledged email service, but you can start working on the parts in advance of that

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