simple-peer-server

Simple-peer-server is a signaling server for simple-peer. It must be used with simple-peer-wrapper on the client/browser side.

Why use simple-peer-server

WebRTC peer connections are an excellent tool for building synchronous drawing, dancing, text, or video applications.

Simple-peer is an excellent library for creating webRTC peer connections, however, it does not include a signaling server, which is necessary for establishing the peer connections used by simple-peer.

How simple-peer-server works

Simple-peer-server provides a signaling server that establishes a connection between two or more peers.

It uses Socket.IO to transport the signaling messages until the peer connections are created.

This package is a signaling server. It is not a STUN or TURN server! If you are launching your application on the public internet, you will likely need a STUN and TURN server as well. See the section below for more info on STUN/TURN.

A note on STUN and TURN servers

Simple-peer-server and simple-peer-wrapper together provide a signaling server and client that establish a connection between two or more peers.

They use Socket.IO to transport the signaling messages, then create the peer connections via simple-peer.

If you are launching your application on the public internet, you will likely need STUN and TURN servers as well. About 86% of connections can be created with just STUN servers, but the remaining connections require TURN servers.

Default STUN servers are provided by simple-peer. Although they can be overwritten (see documentation on this below). TURN servers can be expensive to maintain and need to be provided by the application developer (that's probably you if you're reading this ;).

To learn more about signaling, STUN, and TURN servers, I recommend this article by Sam Dutton. If you are in need of a TURN server, you may find this article on How to set up and configure your own TURN server using Coturn by Gabriel Turner helpful. You could also check out paid services like Twilio's Network Traversal Service.

Once you have your TURN servers setup, see the documentation below for how to add them to your peer connections.

Usage

You must have node and npm installed to use this module. (If this is new to you, you might want to watch this explanation of node before continuing.)

Install the package using npm or your favorite package manager.

# in your terminal

npm install simple-peer-server

Require the module in your server code.

// in app.js

const SimplePeerServer = require('simple-peer-server');

Pass an http server into the signalling server. This will be used by the socket.io server.

// in app.js

const http = require('http');
const server = http.createServer();
const spServer = new SimplePeerServer(server);

Choose a port for your server to listen on.

// in app.js

server.listen(8081);

Run the server.

# in your terminal

node app.js

Options

Simple-peer-server takes three arguments: a server, an option to debug, and an option to add simple-peer options (including STUN/TURN servers).

You must provide a server. The other parameters are optional.

const http = require('http');
const SimplePeerServer = require('simple-peer-server');

const server = http.createServer();
const spServer = new SimplePeerServer(server, true); // second argument turns on console logging from server

server.listen(8081);

The options are as follows:

server is required.

debug is optional. It defaults to false. If true is passed, it turns on additional server logs from the signaling server.

simplePeerOptions is optional. It exposes the options available when creating a new WebRTC peer connection via simple-peer. See simple-peer documentation for more info.

Note! This library sets the peer connections's initiator and stream options automatically. Overriding them by providing options from the server could break your application.

If you'd like to add your own STUN/TURN servers you can do so with as follows:

const simplePeerOptions = {
  config: {
    iceServers: [
      {
        urls: 'stun:stun.l.google.com:19302',
      },
      {
        urls: 'turn:192.158.29.39:3478?transport=udp',
        credential: 'JZEOEt2V3Qb0y27GRntt2u2PAYA=',
        username: '28224511:1379330808',
      },
      {
        urls: 'turn:192.158.29.39:3478?transport=tcp',
        credential: 'JZEOEt2V3Qb0y27GRntt2u2PAYA=',
        username: '28224511:1379330808',
      },
    ],
  },
};

const server = http.createServer();
const spServer = new SimplePeerServer(
  server,
  true,
  simplePeerOptions,
);

Note that any simple-peer options provided by the server will override the default options in simple-peer AND any options provided via simple-peer-wrapper client.

Running the example code

To run the example, navigate into the example folder using your terminal, then run npm install.

# in your terminal

cd simple-peer-server/example
npm install

Run the server.

# in your terminal

npm start

This will run a signaling sever on port 8081. If you are running this on your desktop, it will run on localhost by default at http://localhost:8081

Optional: Run example code with nodemon

The example comes with the nodemon module installed. Nodemon will automatically restart your server every time you make a change to the app.js file. If you'd like to run with nodemon start the server like this instead of running npm start:

# in your terminal

npm run watch