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Using GitHub Pages for NIP-05 Identifiers

What are NIP-05 Identifiers?

NIP-05 Identifiers are an e-mail address notation that confirms the owner of the address also owns a specific domain or sub-domain or the owner allowed you to register there.

Relays can prioritize and clients can "trust" NIP-05 identified users.

This trust-minimized verification system is a decentralised way of combating bad actors. If someone uses a domain to setup NIP-05 identified bots, these can be blocked by relays, and it makes it more difficult for bad actors to be NIP-05 identified as it takes time to setup domains in such a way.

How do NIP-05 Identifies work?

A NIP-05 identifier, of the form <local-part>@<domain> is an address that is resolved to a GET request to the following address:

https://<domain>/.well-known/nostr.json?name=<local-part>

For example, the address of [email protected] has a respective JSON file available to a GET request (via GitHub pages) at:

https://bengweeks.gihub.io/.well-known/nostr.json?name=ben

Where the contents of the JSON file are as follows:

{
  "names": {
    "ben": "971615b70ad9ec896f8d5ba0f2d01652f1dfe5f9ced81ac9469ca7facefad68b"
  }
}

CAREFUL: The string in the JSON file of 971615b70ad9ec896f8d5ba0f2d01652f1dfe5f9ced81ac9469ca7facefad68b is my Nostr public key (PubKey) in HEX format, as apposed to the [more standard] nPub format that starts with nPub1. You can convert your nPub key at https://damus.io/key.

NB The querystring of name=<local-part> is there to be able to dynamically create the JSON file when used by a host for multiple users.

The above example of the NIP-05 identifier for [email protected] can be seen here:

https://bengweeks.github.io/.well-known/nostr.json?name=ben

How do you to use GitHub pages to host your NIP-05 identifier?

To create a NIP-05 identifier using GitHub:

  1. Fork this Repository (or create a new one) using GitHub, naming it yourusername.github.io (otherwise the Url will be yourusername.github.io/repository_name and not the route of your GitHub pages website).
  2. Create a file called .well-known/nostr.json (in lower-case) if you are creating a new repositoy rather than forking this and enter your own "<local-part>": "<public-key>" as described above.
  3. Go to Settings for the Repository, and under Code and automation choose Pages.
  4. Under Source > Build and deployment, rather than Deploy from a branch, choose GitHub Actions and Static HTML (otherwise you will find the JSON file does not get published).
  5. Make a Commit to publish your site.
  6. Confirm the JSON file is available in the browser.

NB GitHub web page hosting is case-sensitive hence suggesting all lower case.

How do you set your NIP-05 Identifier?

Using a client such as https://astral.ninja or https://metadata.nostr.com (the latter requires the Nos2x browser extension), enter your NIP-05 identifier into your profile settings in the form of [email protected].

Note: Most clients are not using this yet.

Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)

Your host must have the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy set correctly to work (such as with GitHub pages - although custom domains may not work). Specifically, the Access-Control-Allow-Origin: * header.

References

Setting up a NIP-05 identifier

Setting up GitHub pages