Welcome! Take a quick tour to get familiar with Beaker.
Beaker also supports a peer-to-peer protocol called Dat, which means you can browse dat:// websites like dat://beakerbrowser.com.
dat:// is a peer-to-peer protocol, which means that visitors to a dat:// site connect directly to one another, downloading and sharing files. Participants on the network are called peers, and when a peer contributes bandwidth to re-upload a site's files, it's called seeding.
One of the most compelling reasons for supporting dat:// in Beaker is that it makes it possible to share a website from the browser with one click!
Just like that, we made a website! To share the website with friends, we can send them the website's URL. Anyone with the URL will be able to view the website in Beaker.
Since dat:// makes it possible to publish files directly from Beaker, wouldn't it be great if you could also edit files in Beaker? You can!
If we click the edit button, we'll be able to update the HTML directly from View Source!
Prefer to use Sublime, Vim, Atom, or Code to edit your projects? You can click the "Set local directory button" to sync the website's files to a directory on your computer. Any changes you make to the files in the directory will be published to the website.
You can edit websites you've created, but you can't edit other people's websites. Beaker provides a built-in tool to make an editable copy of any dat:// website. If you're familiar with GitHub, it's kind of like "forking" a project.
Making an editable copy is especially useful when you want to customize a p2p app. For example, let's say you use dat://fritter.hashbase.io as your social media client, but you don't like round buttons. You could make an editable copy, then customize the CSS to change the button styles, all without losing your user data or friends list!
Beaker has a built-in live-reloading tool for all dat:// pages. Turn on live reloading, and Beaker will automatically reload the page.
Live reloading works for projects you're working on locally and for remote projects on the peer-to-peer network!