Libp2p-relay-server NPM

js-libp2p-relay-server

An out of the box libp2p relay server with HOP enabled

Lead Maintainer

Background

Libp2p nodes acting as circuit relay aim to establish connectivity between libp2p nodes (e.g. IPFS nodes) that wouldn't otherwise be able to establish a direct connection to each other.

A relay is needed in situations where nodes are behind NAT, reverse proxies, firewalls and/or simply don't support the same transports (e.g. go-libp2p vs. browser-libp2p). The circuit relay protocol exists to overcome those scenarios. Nodes with the auto-relay feature enabled can automatically bind themselves on a relay to listen for connections on their behalf.

You can read more in its SPEC.

Usage

Install

> npm install --global libp2p-relay-server

Now you can use the cli command libp2p-relay-server to spawn an out of the box libp2p relay server.

CLI

After installing the relay server, you can use its binary. It accepts several arguments: --peerId, --listenMultiaddrs, --announceMultiaddrs, --metricsPort, --disableMetrics and --disablePubsubDiscovery.

libp2p-relay-server [--peerId <jsonFilePath>] [--listenMultiaddrs <ma> ... <ma>] [--announceMultiaddrs <ma> ... <ma>] [--metricsPort <port>] [--disableMetrics] [--disablePubsubDiscovery]

The main configuration you should include are the PeerId and Multiaddrs, which are detailed next. Using a consistent PeerId will ensure your node's identity is consistent across restarts, and the Multiaddrs will allow you to appropriate bind your local and external addresses so that other peers can connect to you.

PeerId

You can create a PeerId via its CLI.

Once you have a generated PeerId json file, you can start the relay with that PeerId by specifying its path via the --peerId flag:

peer-id --type=ed25519 > id.json
libp2p-relay-server --peerId ./id.json

Multiaddrs

You can specify the libp2p rendezvous server listen and announce multiaddrs. This server is configured with libp2p-tcp and libp2p-websockets, so you will only be able to specify addresses for these transports.

libp2p-relay-server --peerId /path/to/peer-id.json --listenMultiaddrs '/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/15002/ws' '/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/8001' --announceMultiaddrs '/dns4/test.io/tcp' '/dns4/test.io/tcp/443/wss'

By default it listens on /ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/8000 and /ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/15003/ws. It has no announce multiaddrs specified.

Docker

When running the relay server in Docker, you can configure the same parameters via environment variables, as follows:

PEER_ID='/etc/opt/relay/id.json'
LISTEN_MULTIADDRS='/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/15002/ws,/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/8001'
ANNOUNCE_MULTIADDRS='/dns4/test.io/tcp/443/wss,/dns6/test.io/tcp/443/wss'

Please note that you should expose the listening ports with the docker run command. The default ports used are 8003 for the metrics, 8000 for the tcp listener and 150003 for the websockets listener.

Example:

peer-id --type=ed25519 > id.json
docker build . -t libp2p-relay
docker run -p 8003:8003 -p 15002:15002 -p 8000:8000 \
-e LISTEN_MULTIADDRS='/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/8000,/ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/15002/ws' \
-e ANNOUNCE_MULTIADDRS='/dns4/localhost/tcp/8000,/dns4/localhost/tcp/15002/ws' \
-e PEER_ID='/etc/opt/relay/id.json' \
-v $PWD/id.json:/etc/opt/relay/id.json \
-d libp2p-relay

SSL

You should setup an SSL certificate with nginx and proxy to the API. You can use a service that already offers an SSL certificate with the server and configure nginx, or you can create valid certificates with for example Letsencrypt. Letsencrypt won’t give you a cert for an IP address (yet) so you need to connect via SSL to a domain name.

With this, you should specify in your relay the announce multiaddrs for your listening transports. This is specially important for browser peers that will leverage this relay, as browser nodes can only dial peers behind a DNS+WSS multiaddr.

Configuration

Besides the PeerId and Multiaddrs, this server can also have other configurations for fine tuning.

Metrics

Metrics are enabled by default on /ip4/127.0.0.1/tcp/8003 via Prometheus. This port can also be modified with:

libp2p-relay-server --metricsPort '8008'

Moreover, metrics can also be disabled with:

libp2p-relay-server --disableMetrics

Discovery

A discovery module libp2p/js-libp2p-pubsub-peer-discovery is configured and enabled by default. It can be disabled with:

libp2p-relay-server --disablePubsubDiscovery

Docker

On docker you can also specify the configurations above with the following environment variables:

METRICS_PORT='8008'
DISABLE_METRICS='true'
DISABLE_PUBSUB_DISCOVERY='true'

Please note that you should expose expose the used ports with the docker run command.

Debug

You can debug the relay by setting the DEBUG environment variable. For instance, you can set it to libp2p*. These logs can be noisy so you may wish to tune the namespaces that are logging, see the Debug module for detailed usage.