A simple Gun DB relay peer

A one liner gun js server easy to run on any free tier Node.js cloud like https://www.glitch.com, https://www.heroku.com or others, on a private VPS server or any other device like RaspberryPi or mostly any Android phone at hand.

Run in a cloud for free

There's a plenty of cloud providers with free tiers suitable to the needs of running a Gun relay node.

• Remix a Glitch project now

More links to be added here later.

Run on any device

All you need to run a Gun relay is a NodeJS >=16.x environment with npm package manager to import and run the script. It's already up and running in major clouds, but you may need to install NodeJS on your computer, or configure a RaspberryPi.

• Computer

  Open your terminal and check the version of Node with node -v. You may need to Install NodeJS or update it.

• Android device

  You can easily run NodeJS apps on an Android phone with Termux app. Consider installing it from F-Droid to get the fresh and stable version.

• RaspberryPi

  Flash your image and configure your Pi to run a local Gun server

How to use

1. Run this in the command line and follow the steps to create a new NodeJS project

npm init

2. Then install the package as a dependency

npm i @gun-vue/relay

3. Add this line to the generated package.json file

"scripts": {
    "start": "node start.js"
  }

3. Create a start.js script and edit it as follows:

4. Start by pasting this minimal code that imports the relay and initiates it.

import relay from "@gun-vue/relay";

relay.init();

5. Save the start.js and run it.

node start.js

You'll see the message from the relay server running with it's address to use as a Gun peer in your app:

Hello wonderful person! :) Thanks for using GUN, please ask for help on http://chat.gun.eco if anything takes you longer than 5min to figure out!
AXE relay enabled!
Server started at http://localhost:4200/gun
Multicast on 233.255.255.255:8765

You've got your Gun relay up and running!

Options

You can use customize your server with an options object:

relay.init({
	host: "localhost", // A host name used by the server to publish it's state to the graph. Set your peer URL without a protocol, like  'relay.some-site.com'
	port: 4200, // Gun server port. You may use a more standard 8080.
	store: false, // Put true if you want to have Gun store data on disk.
	path: "public", // A public directory to expose your app with the build in express server. Insert a path like '../app/dist'
});

The options may be also set with .env file. The defaults are:

RELAY_HOST="localhost"
RELAY_STORE=false
RELAY_PORT=4200
RELAY_PATH="public"
RELAY_QR=false