iroh-net

This crate contains the networking support for iroh. Iroh networking is built on direct peer-to-peer QUIC connections that use relays and holepunching. The main structure for connection is the Endpoint entrypoint.

Peer to peer connectivity is established with the help of a relay server. The relay server provides Session Traversal Utilities for NAT (STUN) for the peers and connection coordination using the DERP protocol (Designated Relay for Encrypted Packets protocol). If no direct connection can be established, the connection is relayed via the server.

Peers must know and do verify the PeerID of each other before they can connect. When using a relay server to aid the connection establishment they will register with a home relay server using their PublicKey. Other peers which can not establish a direct connection can then establish connection via this relay server. This will try to assist establishing a direct connection using STUN and holepunching but continue relaying if not possible.

Peers can also connect directly without using a relay server. For this, however the listening peer must be directly reachable by the connecting peer via one of it's addresses.

Examples

Examples for iroh-net are in iroh-net/examples, run them with cargo run --example $NAME. Details for each example are in the file/directory itself.

Structured Events

The library uses tracing to for logging as well as for structured events. Events are different from normal logging by convention:

• The target has a prefix of events and target names are dot-separated.

  For this library the target will always start with events.net..

• There is no message.

  Each event has a unique target which indicates the meaning.

• The event fields are exclusively used for structured data.

• The Level is always DEBUG.

Using events

If desired an application can use the events.* target to handle events by a different subscriber. However with the default file logging it is already easy to search for all events, e.g. using ripgrep:

rg 'events\.[a-z_\-.]+' path/to/iroh/logs/iroh.YYYY-MM-DD-NN.log

Which will also highlight the full target name by default on a colour supporting terminal.

Development

Be cautious about adding new events. Events aim for a high signal-to-noise ratio. Events should be designed to be able to extract in an automated way. If multiple events need to be related, fields with special values can be used.

To make events distinct from normal logging in the code it is recommended to write them using the event!() macro:

event!(
    target: "event.net.subject",
    Level::DEBUG,
    field = value,
);

License

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0, (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in this project by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.