libp2p-websocket-star-rendezvous

The rendezvous service for libp2p-websocket-star.

Lead Maintainer

Jacob Heun

Descriptions

Nodes using libp2p-websocket-star will connect to a known point in the network, a rendezvous point where they can learn about other nodes (Discovery) and route their messages to other nodes (2 hop message routing, also known as relay).

Usage

libp2p-websocket-star-rendezvous is the rendezvous server required for libp2p-websocket-star and can be used to start a rendezvous server for development. To do that, first install the module globally in your machine with:

> npm install --global libp2p-websocket-star-rendezvous

This will install a rendezvous CLI tool. Now you can spawn the server with:

> rendezvous --port=9090 --host=127.0.0.1

Defaults:

• port - 9090
• host - '0.0.0.0'

Docker

A docker image is offered for running this service in production

docker pull libp2p/websocket-star-rendezvous:release
docker run -d -p 9090:9090 --name rendezvous libp2p/websocket-star-rendezvous:release

To disable prometheus metrics run the server with -e DISABLE_METRICS=1

docker run -d -p 9090:9090 --name rendezvous -e DISABLE_METRICS=1 libp2p/websocket-star-rendezvous:release

Hosted Rendezvous server

We host a rendezvous server at ws-star.discovery.libp2p.io that can be used for practical demos and experimentation, it should not be used for apps in production.

A libp2p-websocket-star address, using the signalling server we provide, looks like:

/dns4/ws-star.discovery.libp2p.io/wss/p2p-websocket-star/ipfs/<your-peer-id>

Note: The address above indicates WebSockets Secure, which can be accessed from both http and https.

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.

LICENSE MIT