Why can public IPFS gateways not show my files?

Help
1

Hi, I’ve uploaded a directory of json files to IPFS. I can use ipfs get to retrieve them via their hash. I can use http://localhost:8080/ipfs/ to resolve them by their hash as well. I can not see the images on https://ipfs.io/ipfs/ or any other public gateways as it always says 504. I can however see all of the file names on IPLD explorer website though for the directory I added. How do I know if my IPFS is connected right?

2

Using ipfs.io isn’t a very good test, it tends to fail even on good CIDs. We need to check a few things:

We need your node’s PeerID, so that:

  • we can see if its address is in the DHT
  • we can test if we can connect to your node

We need a couple example CIDs that are on your node, so that:

  • we can see if your node reports having them
  • we can see if they are in the DHT, pointing to your node
  • we can see if we can download them from your node

Any of these things could fail, and would point to a different problem. If nothing fails, you are fine and it’s just ipfs.io not doing a very good job at finding you.