Friends

P2P chat powered by the Web

Alpha quality you probably only want to use this if you like to send pull requests fixing things :)

How it works

See our site or the gh-pages branch.

Logging in

You need a working git + github configuration

• have a publicly listed github email (e.g. shows up on your github account)
• if you dont wanna do that then do git config --global user.username yourusername

When you launch the app it should "just work" now if you have git setup correctly :)

If it doesnt work, do this to get debug information:

$ npm i github-current-user -g
$ DEBUG=* github-current-user

Note: DSA keys are not supported. You should switch to RSA anyway for security reasons.

If it can't verify you, try doing ssh-add ~/.ssh/id_rsa. Your key should show up when you run ssh-add -l.

Building

You'll need the newest io.js and npm (>= 1.8.1, >= 2.8.3)

• npm install
• npm run rebuild-leveldb to compile leveldown for electron. you will have to modify the command in package.json if you are non a non 64 bit architecture
• npm start to run in electron
• npm run package to build distributable.

Running on a server

We have included a message seeding utility (named "peerbot") that you can run yourself on a server to ensure that there will always be a peer available to connect to for a channel.

• first, follow the build instructions above
• npm i electron-spawn electron-prebuilt -g
• electron-spawn peerbot.js --channel=cats

it always seeds the #friends channel, pass --channel=mychannel to also seed another channel. you can specify as many channels as you want with multiple --channel flags

If you running it on headless Ubuntu, you will need to use xvfb-run to create a virtual display so that Chromium can run:

$ sudo apt-get install xvfb
$ xvfb-run electron-spawn peerbot.js

Also you may need to apt-get install libgconf-2-4

License

MIT