Give a DreamWeave client your mod page’s address and it finds the rest without reading the page’s
HTML beyond one <link>, without JavaScript, without an API, and without asking anyone else.
What the site publishes#
| Path | What |
|---|---|
dreamweave.json | The site index: every project’s id, name, manifest URL, manifest SHA-256, last release date and channel heads |
dreamweave/projects/<id>.json | One manifest per project: identity, releases, artifacts, install data |
schemas/*.schema.json | The JSON Schemas for the above |
Paths are relative to the site’s base URL, so a GitHub Pages project site publishes
https://you.github.io/your-repo/dreamweave.json. Manifest paths use the project id, not the page
path, so renaming a project’s directory does not move its manifest.
How it is advertised#
Every page carries:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/vnd.dreamweave.index+json" href="https://you.github.io/your-repo/dreamweave.json">and every project page also carries its own manifest:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/vnd.dreamweave.project+json" href="https://you.github.io/your-repo/dreamweave/projects/4d0c9f6e-….json">A client that cannot or will not parse HTML tries dreamweave.json next to the address it was
given, then in each parent directory up to the origin’s root. The
protocol spells out the algorithm.
Why not /.well-known/#
.well-known URIs are defined at the root of an origin. A GitHub Pages project site does not own
https://you.github.io/.well-known/; the account’s user site does, if it exists at all. A discovery
scheme that only works for sites at the root of a domain would leave out most mods. A relative path
plus a <link> works on every host, at every depth.
Indexes#
An index (St4sh, a community list, a search engine) needs only dreamweave.json to notice changes:
when a project’s manifest_sha256 is unchanged, its manifest is unchanged, and there is nothing to
fetch. An index may cache, mirror, categorize and rank what it finds. It is never where a project’s
identity or release data lives; that stays on the project’s own site, where the author publishes it.