Publishing a Walrus Site

Now that everything is installed and configured, you should be able to start publishing your first Walrus Site!

Select the source material for the site

The site-builder works by uploading a directory of files produced by any web framework to Walrus and adding the relevant metadata to Sui. This directory should have a file called index.html in its root, which will be the entry point to the Walrus Site.

There is a very useful example-Walrus-sites repository that contains multiple kinds of sites that you can use for reference.

For simplicity, we will start by publishing the most frugal of the sites, the walrus-snake game.

First, clone the repository of the examples:

git clone https://github.com/MystenLabs/example-walrus-sites.git && cd example-walrus-sites

Publish the site

Since we have placed the walrus and site-builder binaries and configuration in their default locations, publishing the ./walrus-snake site is as simple as calling the publishing command:

site-builder publish ./walrus-snake --epochs 100

The end of the output should look like the following:

Execution completed
Resource operations performed:
  - created resource /.DS_Store with blob ID PwNzE9_a9anYb8AZysafQZGqd4h0scsTGhzF2GPsWmQ
  - created resource /Oi-Regular.ttf with blob ID KUTTV_95_c68oQhaRP97tDPOYu0vqCWiGL7mzOq1faU
  - created resource /file.svg with blob ID oUpm044qBN1rkyIJYvMB4dUj6bRe3QEvJAN-cvlIFmk
  - created resource /index.html with blob ID AR03hvxSlyfYl-7MhXct4y3rnIIGPHdnjiIF03BK_XY
  - created resource /walrus.svg with blob ID xK8K1Q5khrl3eBT4jEiB-L_gyShEIOVWti8DcAoEjtw
The site routes were modified

Created new site: test site
New site object ID: 0xe674c144119a37a0ed9cef26a962c3fdfbdbfd86a3b3db562ee81d5542a4eccf
To browse the site, you have the following options:
        1. Run a local portal, and browse the site through it: e.g. http://5qs1ypn4wn90d6mv7d7dkwvvl49hdrlpqulr11ngpykoifycwf.localhost:3000
           (more info: https://docs.wal.app/walrus-sites/portal.html#running-the-portal-locally)
        2. Use a third-party portal (e.g. wal.app), which will require a SuiNS name.
           First, buy a SuiNS name at suins.io (e.g. example-domain), then point it to the site object ID.
           Finally, browse it with: https://example-domain.wal.app

This output tells you that, for each file in the folder, a new Walrus blob was created, and the respective blob ID. Further, it prints the object ID of the Walrus Site object on Sui (so you can have a look in the explorer and use it to set the SuiNS name) and, finally, the URL at which you can browse the site.

Note here that we are implicitly using the default sites-config.yaml as the config for the site builder that we set up previously on the installation section. The configuration file is necessary to ensure that the site-builder knows the correct Sui package for the Walrus Sites logic.

More details on the configuration of the site-builder can be found under the advanced configuration section.

Update the site

Let's say now you want to update the content of the site, for example by changing the title from "eat all the blobs!" to "Glob all the Blobs!".

First, make this edit on in the ./walrus-snake/index.html file.

Then, you can update the existing site by running the update command, providing the directory where to find the updated files (still ./walrus-snake) and the object ID of the existing site (0x407a3081...):

site-builder update --epochs 100 ./walrus-snake 0xe674c14...

The output this time should be:

Execution completed
Resource operations performed:
  - deleted resource /index.html with blob ID LVLk9VSnBrEgQ2HJHAgU3p8IarKypQpfn38aSeUZzzE
  - created resource /index.html with blob ID pcZaosgEFtmP2d2IV3QdVhnUjajvQzY2ev8d9U_D5VY
The site routes were left unchanged

Site object ID: 0xe674c144119a37a0ed9cef26a962c3fdfbdbfd86a3b3db562ee81d5542a4eccf
To browse the site, you have the following options:
        1. Run a local portal, and browse the site through it: e.g. http://2ql9wtro4xf2x13pm9jjeyhhfj28okawz5hy453hkyfeholy6f.localhost:3000
           (more info: https://docs.wal.app/walrus-sites/portal.html#running-the-portal-locally)
        2. Use a third-party portal (e.g. wal.app), which will require a SuiNS name.
           First, buy a SuiNS name at suins.io (e.g. example-domain), then point it to the site object ID.
           Finally, browse it with: https://example-domain.wal.app

Compared to the publish action, we can see that now the only actions performed were to delete the old index.html, and update it with the newer one.

Browsing to the provided URL should reflect the change. You've updated the site!