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Recurse Center Day 9: A Peer-To-Peer Chat System

Oct. 06 2016

#recurse center #p2p #distributed systems #node

Today I worked on a fun 'lil set of p2p exercises written by mafintosh. I wrote a very basic p2p chat tool, which at the moment requires that the network be fully connected, or rather that each node in the system is connected to every other node.

The code is on GitHub, so you can try it out for yourself!

In 3 separate terminals run these commands, which will connect three peers and allow them to chat on your local network.

node peer.js your-name localhost:3000 localhost:3001 localhost:3002

node peer.js friend1 localhost:3001 localhost:3002 localhost:3000

node peer.js friend2 localhost:3002 localhost:3000 localhost:3001

And then you can start chatting with your imaginary friends. Neat0. Next I'll implement a gossip protocol so that the network doesn't need to be fully connected, and a node will receive messages as long as it is connected to a peer who is also connected to the sender.