README.md

WebRTC peer-to-peer

This is a browser JS library that makes it easy to manage RTC peer connections, streams and data channels. It's currently used in emscripten to provide data transport for the posix sockets implementation.

Requirements

You will need either Firefox, or Chrome.

What it does

• Firefox and Chrome supported
• Binary transport using arraybuffers (Firefox only!)
• Multiple connections
• Broker service (on heroku), or run your own
• Connection timeouts

What it doesn't do (yet!)

• Peer brokering for establishing new connections through existing peer-to-peer

Quick start

Setting up a peer is easy. The code below will create a new peer and listen for incoming connections. The onconnection handler is called each time a new connection is ready.

// Create a new Peer
var peer = new Peer(
  'wss://webrtc-p2p-broker.herokuapp.com', // You can use this broker if you don't want to set one up
  {
    binaryType: 'arraybuffer',
    video: false,
    audio: false
  }
);

// Listen for incoming connections
peer.listen();

var connections = {};

// Handle new connections
peer.onconnection = function(connection) {
  // Store connections here so we can use them later
  connections[connection.id] = connection; // Each connection has a unique ID

  connection.ondisconnect = function(reason) {
    delete connections[connection.id];
  };

  connection.onerror = function(error) {
    console.error(error);
  };

  // Handle messages from this channel
  // The label will be 'reliable' or 'unreliable', depending on how it was received
  connection.onmessage = function(label, message) {
    console.log(label, message);
  };

  // Sends a message to the other peer using the reliable data channel
  connection.send('reliable', 'hi!');

  // The connection exposes the underlying media streams
  // You can attach them to DOM elements to get video/audio, if available
  console.log(connection.streams.local, connection.streams.remote);

  // Closes the connection
  // This will cause `ondisconnect` to fire
  connection.close();
};

// Print our route when it's available
peer.onroute = function(route) {
  // This is our routing address from the broker
  // It's used by peers who wish to connect with us
  console.log('route:', route);
};

peer.onerror = function(error) {
  console.log(error);
};

Another peer can connect easily to the one we made above by calling connect() on its routing address.

peer.connect(route);

Demo

There are some files in the demo directory that offer an example. You can load it here and open the connect URL in another window. For this example, the route is added to the URL query string so that the other peer can parse it and connect when the page loads, so all you need to share is the URL.