A web gateway to a decentralised Maven repository. Let us break it down for you.
IPFS is a distributed, content-addressed file system. Maven is a package manager and build tool for JVM languages. Maven also defines a repository format, so that anyone can implement a private repository.
We provide a gateway, so that your jar files can be hosted on IPFS.
Because a private (or even public) repository is a single point of failure in your build chain. By hosting your repository on IPFS, you decentralise storage of artifacts, thus removing single points of failure.
As long as one developer's PC is still running, your artifacts will be available to download, so that developers can keep developing and build servers can keep building. This is unlike the common situation, where a centralised repository server going down prevents builds from running.
It's your standard maven project. Create an executable jar with
mvn package
and run it with
java -jar target/ipfs-gateway-*.jar
The gateway listens on port 5002 by default.
(Also, don't forget to run the ipfs daemon).
At the moment this is a manual process (but it could be scripted).