Helia is the modern JavaScript implementation of IPFS (the InterPlanetary File System). It is a core building block of Gargantis: it provides content-addressed storage and the libp2p networking stack that the peer-to-peer network is built on, entirely inside the browser node.
Role in Gargantis#
- Content addressing. Scene assets and JSON-3D documents are identified by cryptographic hash (CID). Any peer holding a CID can serve it, so there is no origin server (this replaces the legacy AWS S3/CloudFront origin entirely).
- Transport & discovery. libp2p (bundled with Helia) handles peer discovery, connection, NAT traversal, and pubsub — the substrate for per-realm and per-stream topics.
- Data plane for streams. The Web Stream Message Protocol and its log semantics ride on libp2p pubsub plus content-addressed blocks for replay.
Deployment#
The Hugo documentation site is deployable to IPFS as well as Cloudflare Workers, so the docs themselves can be served by the same content-addressed fabric as the protocol.