Robust browser-based peer to peer networks
Happily announcing Membrane v2 with overhauled developer experience and reliability!
## What's this? Membrane is a protocol that takes WebRTC signalling to the browser with living peer networks. With minimal server-based bootstrapping, it makes self-sufficient peer-to-peer networks that can operate without servers. Any member browser can create a connection to any other by signaling across its peers, avoiding clumsy, centralized signaling servers. The network automatically stabilizes its topology and coordinates using broadcast "gossip". Designed to be agnostic and easy to use, membrane is ideal for web clients for distributed chat, hosting, torrenting, computing, and so much more! |  | |:--:| | *[Membranexus.com](https://membranexus.com), built using Membrane. After a first-contact server signal, clients never need to interact with a server again - all network functions can happen on the peer level.* | Membrane leverages `RTCPeerConnection`'s agnosticism about signalling. You could just as well communicate `ICE` connection data through smoke signals or quantum teleportation as through a standard signalling server. In many cases, signaling servers are an unreliable and vulnerable approach. Membrane attempts to implement a better alternative protocol. With each membrane network acting as a giant, decentralized router, unconnected members on opposite sides of the earth can exchange arbitrary data in milliseconds, with no clumsy intermediary server or risk of downtime. Of course, this approach isn't perfect. The benefits of decentralization are ultimately also the fatal flaw. What it gains in robustness and decentralization, it loses in making spoofing and manipulation easier. A public key ledger for cryptographic signing is WIP, which should largely remedy these issues (it will likely be served up by the signaling server on initial connectioen, which isn't a problem, since new peers can only be added when the server's up). And for non trust-critical operations, the existing implementation should be good enough. ## Installation and Integation ### Installing the Demo or Building From Source #### Prerequisites - `npm` - `npx` - `node.js` ### Paste the following commands into a terminal to build a complete directory structure and initialize the demo on 127.0.0.1:8000 anywhere with the prerequisities installed. ```shell wget Membrane-current.tar.gz https://github.com/Elijah-Bodden/Membrane/tarball/v2.1.1 tar xfv Membrane-current.tar.gz --transform 's!^[^/]\+\($\|/\)!Membrane-current\1!' cd Membrane-current/src/source/frontend npm install cd ../server npm install npm run deploy rm ../../../../Membrane-current.tar.gz ``` To kill the pm2 instance this creates, run `npm run kill`. To re-spawn it, run `npm run deploy` in `/src/source/server`. ### Deploying a New First-Contact Signalling Server Installing the pre-made server from `/src/source/server/index.noStatic.js` is a piece of cake! Just run `npm i membrane-server` at the root of your node project, sit back, and relax while it installs. To deploy the server on pm2, run `npm explore membrane-server -- npm run deploy`. To kill the pm2 instance, run `npx pm2 kill`. Now just remember to replace the websocket addresses in your client's config with your new server's. You will likely also want to set up coturn TURN and STUN servers and replace the addresses in the frontend's `defaultConfig` with those. And since this is a standalone signaling server, you'll have to serve your frontend (in the demo's case, `/src/source/frontend/dist`) separately. ### Build Your Own App! Using the library for your own use-case is relatively simple. Here's a typical integration process. Find the delivery method you like below, then head down below to the general next steps | Delivery Method | Instructions | ---- | ---- | npm + Webpack | Run `npm install @elijah-bodden/membrane \| cd node-modules/elijah-bodden/membrane` in the root of your webpack project | | HTML script tag | Go to the directory you serve static files from and find where you want to save the script. Run `wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Elijah-Bodden/Membrane/main/lib/index.js -o membrane.js`, and finally paste `

P2P self-hosting

Publish ``` ## Contributing I appreciate any contributions! If you see something you think you can improve in the code, please make a PR. If you just have an idea or spot a bug, that's great too! Please, open an `issue` with either the `bug` or `enhancement` tag. And if you just want to show some love to the project, it'd mean a ton if you left a star! ## Authors * **Elijah Bodden** - *Initial work* - [Elijah-Bodden](https://github.com/Elijah-Bodden) ## License MIT License. See the [LICENSE](LICENSE) file for details. ## Built With - The core module - 100% [Vanilla.js](http://vanilla-js.com/). Also check out [kNow](https://github.com/Elijah-Bodden/kNow), which I spun off of membrane's homebrew event handler. - Demo frontend - HTML/SCSS/JS (because i'm stupid), plus [Sigma.js](https://github.com/jacomyal/sigma.js)+[Graphology](https://github.com/graphology/graphology) to power the gorgeous network visualization graph (and some pretty Font Awesome icons!) - Backend - [Node](https://github.com/nodejs/node) using lots of libraries, but especially [Winston](https://github.com/winstonjs/winston) for logging and [WS](https://github.com/websockets/ws) for websockets ## Contact Elijah Bodden - elijahbodden@protonmail.com / admin@membranexus.com Project - https://github.com/Elijah-Bodden/Membrane