scuttlebot-ws

A socket.io WebSocket wrapper for scuttlebot

Install

npm install

Plans

I created this app in order to allow for an sbot instance on a raspberry-pi to be usable by a webapp on my phone. This is an express server with three websocket channels (so far):

• user-stream
• feed-stream
• log-stream

Remaining tasks

Retrieve history

The websocket channels allow any incoming messages to be available to a listening app in real-time. The next step is to ensure some number of previous messages to be made available. This can also be done using streams via a websocket channel, but this needs to be implemented.

Authentication

Webapp clients will be run from anywhere given the increasing use of p2p technologies such as ssb, IPFS, and Dat. Communication between these client instances and this server need to be secured via authentication.

Storage considerations

The plan is to run this server (and sbot) on a Raspberri Pi. But sbot by default writes the entire feed of a user to ~/.ssb (on Linux and OSX). This directory can easily and quickly reach multiple gigabytes, which is a problem on single board computers (SBCs). There are some possible solutions for this:

• emit older messages to clients without saving to disk
  • periodically prune saved messages
• mount ~/.ssb to an external mount point
• limit the amount of historic messages retrieved by default