js-libp2p-webrtc-star

libp2p WebRTC transport that includes a discovery mechanism provided by the signalling-star

Description

libp2p-webrtc-star is one of the WebRTC transports available for libp2p. `libp2p-webrtc-star incorporates both a transport and a discovery service that is facilitated by the signalling server, also part of this module.

Note: This module uses pull-streams for all stream based interfaces.

Example

TODO

Usage

Installation

> npm install libp2p-webrtc-star

API

Follows the interface defined by interface-transport

Signalling server

libp2p-webrtc-star comes with its own signalling server, used for peers to handshake their signalling data and establish a connection. You can install it in your machine by installing the module globally:

> npm install --global libp2p-webrtc-star

This will expose a star-sig cli tool. To spawn a server do:

> star-sig --port=9090 --host=127.0.0.1

Defaults:

• port - 13579
• host - '0.0.0.0'

Hosted Signalling Server

We host a signalling server at signalling.cloud.ipfs.team that can be used for practical demos and experimentation, it should not be used for apps in production.

Since multiaddr doesn't have support for DNS yet, you have to add your libp2p-webrtc-star multiaddr by using the IP address instead. To know the Signalling server address, you can do:

» dig +short webrtc-star-signalling.cloud.ipfs.team
188.166.203.82

And so, a webrtc-star address should looking like: /ip4/188.166.203.82/tcp/20000/ws/ipfs/<your-peer-id>

Deployment

We have a dokku setup ready for this to be deployed, to deploy simple do (you have to have permission first):

# if you already have added the remote, you don't need to do it again
> git remote add dokku [email protected]:webrtc-star-signalling
> git push dokku master

Notes

This module uses pull-streams

We expose a streaming interface based on pull-streams, rather then on the Node.js core streams implementation (aka Node.js streams). pull-streams offers us a better mechanism for error handling and flow control guarantees. If you would like to know more about why we did this, see the discussion at this issue.

You can learn more about pull-streams at:

• The history of Node.js streams, nodebp April 2014
• The history of streams, 2016
• pull-streams, the simple streaming primitive
• pull-streams documentation

Converting pull-streams to Node.js Streams

If you are a Node.js streams user, you can convert a pull-stream to a Node.js stream using the module pull-stream-to-stream, giving you an instance of a Node.js stream that is linked to the pull-stream. For example:

const pullToStream = require('pull-stream-to-stream')

const nodeStreamInstance = pullToStream(pullStreamInstance)
// nodeStreamInstance is an instance of a Node.js Stream

To learn more about this utility, visit https://pull-stream.github.io/#pull-stream-to-stream.