Walrus Sites are "web" sites that use Sui and Walrus as their core technology. It is one of the best examples of how Walrus can be used to create new and exciting decentralized applications. Anyone can create, distribute, and make a Walrus Site accessible to the world! Interestingly, this documentation itself is also available as a Walrus Site at https://docs.wal.app/walrus-sites/intro.html (if you're not already there).
In summary, some of the most exciting features include:
Publishing a site does not require server management or complex configurations; just provide the source files (produced by your favorite web framework), publish to Walrus Sites using the site-builder tool, and the process is complete!
Sites can be linked from ordinary Sui objects. This feature allows for the creation of an NFT collection where each NFT has its own unique website.
Walrus Sites belong to addresses on Sui and can be traded, shared, and updated thanks to Sui's flexible programming model. This means that, among other things, Walrus Sites can leverage the SuiNS naming system to have human-readable names. No need to deal with DNS anymore!
Thanks to the decentralized structure of Walrus and extremely high data availability, there is no risk of your site being deleted for any reason.
Since they are hosted on Walrus, these sites cannot have a traditional back end in the conventional sense and can therefore be considered "static" sites. However, developers can integrate with Sui-compatible wallets and leverage Sui's programmability to add back-end functionality to Walrus Sites!
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To provide a very general overview of how Walrus Sites work, let's look at an example: on Sui, there is a simple NFT collection with a front-end dApp for minting NFTs hosted on Walrus Sites, and each NFT has its own unique, personalized Walrus Site.
You can check the new page at https://flatland.wal.app/. This site is presented to your browser via the Walrus Site portal https://wal.app. Although the operation of the portal will be explained in a later section, for now, consider that there could be many portals (even localhost by anyone who wants to have their own portal and even on another platform). Additionally, the sole function of the portal is to obtain the metadata (from Sui) and source files (from Walrus) that constitute the site.
If you have a Sui wallet containing some SUI, you can try "minting a new Flatlander" from the site. This action creates an NFT from the collection and shows you two links: one to the explorer, and the other to the "Flatlander site." This second site is a special Walrus Site page that exists only for that NFT and has special features (background color, image, ...) depending on the content of the NFT.
The URL of the site specific to this NFT looks like this: . You will notice that the domain remains the same, but the path is a long and randomly appearing string https://flatland.wal.app/0x811285f7bbbaad302e23a3467ed8b8e56324ab31294c27d7392dac649b215716f. This string is actually the hexadecimal encoding of the object ID of the NFT and is in the form of 0x811285f7b... This path is unique for each NFT and is used to retrieve metadata and source files for the related page. The page is then generated according to the properties of the NFT.wal.app
In summary:
Walrus Sites are served through a portal; in this case, https://wal.app. There can be multiple portals, and anyone can host a portal.
The subdomain in the URL points to a specific object on Sui that allows the browser to fetch and process the site resources. This pointer must be a SuiNS name like `<SuiNS name>` flatland and is located at https://flatland.wal.app.
It is possible for each path on Sui to correspond to a specific object; this allows the browser to fetch and generate a page based on the properties of the NFT.
Are you curious how this magic is possible? Read the technical overview! If you want to get started with Walrus Sites, check out the tutorial guide.
