Great question! Let’s break this down clearly:

Short Answer #

By default, public IPFS gateways do NOT expose the source peer's ID (or machine info) in HTTP response headers when serving content. There are a few key reasons for this—privacy concerns, the fact that gateways may fetch content from multiple peers, and cached content not requiring a fresh peer lookup.

Ways to Get Source Peer Information #

If you need to track down which peer provided the content, here are your practical options:

1. Deploy your own IPFS gateway with custom logging/headers #

If you run your own gateway, you can modify its setup to capture and expose the source Peer ID:

• Enable debug logging in your IPFS node settings—this will log exactly which peers the gateway retrieves content from.
• You can extend the gateway's HTTP handler to add a custom response header (like X-IPFS-Source-Peer) that includes the Peer ID of the node that provided the content. This requires some familiarity with IPFS gateway code or middleware tools to implement.

2. Use IPFS command-line tools to find content providers #

Instead of relying on a gateway, you can query the IPFS network directly using your local node:

• Run the command ipfs dht findprovs <your-CID> to get a list of all peers that host the content. For your example CID, that would be:

  ipfs dht findprovs QmXjFR1MiAMYprPjwLQwXXonYK52FihQVEL6a2dh3uhUey
  

• This command queries the Distributed Hash Table (DHT) to return Peer IDs of nodes hosting the content. You can then use ipfs id <peer-ID> to get more details about that node (like its multiaddrs).

3. Note: Caching affects peer tracking #

Keep in mind that if a public gateway has already cached your content, it will serve it directly from its local storage instead of querying the network. In this case, there’s no source peer to track for that request—you’d only get peer info when the gateway performs a fresh fetch of the content.

内容的提问来源于stack exchange，提问作者Gopalakrishna Palem