Uploading from browser not a common use case?

I’m trying to figure out if this is a supported use case and it’s pretty confusing.

Basically, I dont want to bother with receiving images on my webserver; I want to do:

  1. Client uploads files to IPFS, send CID to my server
  2. On server I then do an ipfs ls to get the metadata of the CID and inspect it to make sure it looks right without downloading the files.
  3. if it looks good, pin it.

I would have thought this was a simple (and common?) use case but it’s been a bit fraught:

  • Infura doesn’t allow ls.
  • Pinata’s IPFS node doesnt return file name or size (I need the size)
  • Pinata’s public gateway also has a CORS config which doesn’t allow you to upload from a browser.

So is uploading from the browser directly to IPFS a common use case? Am I supposed to be running a node or something?

Thanks

You can either do a VPN to your server and access the webgui of the node running on the server this way, with your browser - or you just install the desktop client on your computer and configure it to use a pinning api on your server.

ipfs-cluster can provide a pinning api.