Iroh Relay

Iroh's relay is a feature within iroh, a peer-to-peer networking system designed to facilitate direct, encrypted connections between devices. Iroh aims to simplify decentralized communication by automatically handling connections through "relays" when direct connections aren't immediately possible. The relay server helps establish connections by temporarily routing encrypted traffic until a direct, P2P connection is feasible. Once this direct path is set up, the relay server steps back, and the data flows directly between devices. This approach allows Iroh to maintain a secure, low-latency connection, even in challenging network situations.

This crate provides a complete setup for creating and interacting with iroh relays, including:

• Relay Protocol: The protocol used to communicate between relay servers and clients

• Relay Server: A fully-fledged iroh-relay server over HTTP or HTTPS. Optionally will also expose a QAD endpoint and metrics.

• Relay Client: A client for establishing connections to the relay.

• Server Binary: A CLI for running your own relay server. It can be configured to also expose metrics.

Used in iroh, created with love by the n0 team.

Local testing

Advice for testing your application that uses iroh with a locally running iroh-relay server

dev mode

When running the relay server using the --dev flag, you will:

• only run the server over http, not https
• will NOT run the QUIC endpoint that enables QUIC address discovery

The relay can be contacted at "http://localhost:3340".

Both https and QUIC address discovery require TLS certificates. It's possible to run QUIC address discovery using locally generated TLS certificates, but it takes a few extra steps and so, is disabled by default for now.

dev mode with QUIC address discovery

So you want to test out QUIC address discovery locally?

In order to do that you need TLS certificates.

The easiest get that is to generate self-signed certificates using rcgen

• get rcgen (git clone https://github.com/rustls/rcgen)
• cd to the rcgen directory
• generate local certs using cargo run -- -o path/to/certs

Next, add the certificate paths to your iroh-relay config, here is an example of a config.toml file that will enable quic address discovery.

enable_quic_addr_discovery = true

[tls]
cert_mode = "Manual"
manual_cert_path = "/path/to/certs/cert.pem"
manual_key_path = "/path/to/certs/cert.key.pem"

Then run the server with the --dev flag, like you would when normally testing locally: cargo run --features="server" --bin iroh-relay -- --config-path=/path/to/config.toml --dev

The relay server will run over http on port 3340, as it does using the --dev flag, but it will also run a QUIC server on port 7824.

The relay will use the configured TLS certificates for the QUIC connection, but use http (rather than https) for the server.

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.