Make a P2P connection in 10 minutes

#javascript #web #node #descentralized

This is a short guide on how to make a P2P chat. My aim is to give you only a taste if you like I could write a deeper article explaining how all these things work. That said, let's start.

Preparation

The only thing you will need is the latest NodeJS and your favorite editor, mine is Visual Studio Code. Now create a folder for our project, open a command line, initialize an npm repo with npm init and install some libraries we will need with:



npm i --save discovery-swarm dat-swarm-defaults portfinder get-port

Our first P2P connection

Let's start by doing a simple P2P connection, thanks to some great libraries from the Node.js community it is too simple:

Run this code in two consoles and this is it!. Now you can run it in other device right in your LAN and should work even without internet, also you can share and run this script in any other computer or device with internet around the world and it just works, so nice!

How it works?

This code uses the technology behind the Dat Project. All communications are decentralized and work over a P2P network.

...

I love feedback. Ask me questions, comment on your experience with P2P technologies and share your ideas! Thanks for reading :)

This series is possible thanks to the awesome tools delivered by the DatProject, Webtorrent and the NodeJS community.

Follow me on here and on Twitter if you want to know more about tech and distributed P2P networks: https://twitter.com/carloslfu

Top comments (14)

Comment deleted

Carlos Galarza • Aug 9 '18

Of course, Rinay, email me with more details or some code I can find a moment to help you. Sorry for the late response I last month I was busy.

menaka lakshan • May 2 '18

hi Carlos Galarza this is great as i expected. but i have small problem here. when i run this script on two different computers this will not works as expected. can you plz help me.

Carlos Galarza • May 2 '18

Of course, I will email you.

daaadyaaar • Oct 16 '18

Could you share this concept for me as well, I would like to use your solution between some valid computers IP on the internet or a bigger network.
Thanks

Carlos Galarza • Oct 18 '18

I this code doesn't work for you I recommend you to use dev.to/carloslfu/comment/68ih. You don't need to put the computers IP in the code. Computers are connected with each other using the channel name:

/**
 * The channel we are connecting to.
 * Peers should discover other peers in this channel
 */
sw.join('our-fun-channel-name')

Hope it helps

daaadyaaar • Oct 22 '18

Thanks for replying me Carlos.

Jake Casto • Mar 20 '18

Great Article! Very brief and got right to the point, loved it. How would you go about creating a P2P connection on remote (non-local) devices?

Carlos Galarza • Mar 26 '18

Hi Jake, thanks! If you run the script in two remote computer with internet it works. I have updated the article for clarifying it. I am glad you liked the article :)

Hushino • Dec 31 '18

Not work, any example of how peer_id: TCP_Connection works?

Carlos Galarza • Oct 18 '18

If this implementation sometimes doesn't work is because of some issues with the discovery-swarm library. Fortunately, Hyperswarm was released recently. It implements a more reliable way of doing peer discovery. So, if you are experimenting issues try to use it now, this article pfrazee.hashbase.io/blog/hyperswarm about Hyperswarm includes a code example and here is the GitHub repo with some docs: github.com/hyperswarm/discovery.