peero-server

Websocket server which facilitates discovery between Peero client peers.

What & why

WebRTC peers are unable to connect to each other without exchanging connection data (IP adresses, etc). The way this exchange is performed is not a part of the WebRTC spec, so it's up to the developer to come up with a way to do this. There are already signaling servers which do exactly this, but Peero server is just a different type of implementation that's supposed to be simple and open source.

The only thing the server does is keep a list of online peers, and passes SDP data from one peer to another to make those peers connect. All communication between peers is strictly peer-to-peer. There is also an implementation of a Peero client, which connects to the server and available peers.

Installation & usage

To run the server, you will need to have Node installed. The code is not available on npm, so you will have to pull/download it from Github. And then in command line:

> cd peero-server
> # install pm2 globally if it isn't installed already
> npm install pm2 -g
> pm2 pm2.config.js

A client can connect with the server on ws://localhost:8080. You can read the PM2 documentation on how to work with the process manager.

You can copy .env.example to a new .env file to set some environment settings, for example:

NODE_ENV=production
WS_PORT=8000

How it works

The server works only with websocket requests. All messages passed from and to the server are serialized JSON/Javascript objects. For a client to connect to the server it needs to send a 'register' message:

{
    type: 'register'
}

When the server receives that message, it will generate a UUIDv4 ID and send it to the client:

{
    type: 'register',
    data: { peerId: 'af988091-4454...' }
}

The server will simultaneously send messages to other connected clients to announce a new client:

{
    type: 'announce',
    data: { peerId: 'af988091-4454...' }
}

It will also send all currently connected clients to the new client:

{
    type: 'peers',
    data: {
        peers: [
            '6f01ab34-3a56...',
            '72a4ad27-bde5...'
        ]
    }
}