Earthstar Servers

An Earthstar server is an always-online peer which can synchronise with other Earthstar peers over a HTTP.

It’s also just a server, so it can handle requests from browsers and serve back responses, e.g. HTML pages made from data on your Earthstar shares.

An Earthstar server is configured with extensions which give the server its capabilities. For example: syncing over a websocket connection, managing a server’s capabilities, or serving share payloads over HTTP.

About shares and discoverability

Earthstar peers only sync shares they have in common, and they do this without revealing to each other what those shares are. If a peer connects and wants to sync their +gardening share with the server, the server will need a read capability for that share ahead of time to do so.

In future there will be extensions to do this remotely. For now, you can manually configure the Peer with its desired capabilities upon instantiation of Server.