IGignoramous·Oct 16, 2020
Fun! https://tailscale.com/blog/how-nat-traversal-works/
For JavaScript, see: https://github.com/feross/simple-peer
In What if we had Local-First Software?feross
simple-peer
JavaScript2015–2022
feross / simple-peer
simple-peer
📡 Simple WebRTC video, voice, and data channels
15Distinct people
18Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
7.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
📡 Simple WebRTC video, voice, and data channels
GitHub
Where it is used
- Speakrandom — Speakrandom - Voice-chat social network using simple-peer to create audio conferences! Source
- Deskreen — Deskreen - A desktop app that helps you to turn any device into a secondary screen for your computer. It uses simple-peer for sharing entire computer screen to any device with a web browser. Source
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:01:32 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year18 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-07-15 17:27:10 UTC to 2022-11-29 20:27:08 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
What Hacker News says
6 sourcesI used simple-peer [1] for sending coordinates between clients in a canvas painting game [2].
[1] https://github.com/feross/simple-peer
[2] https://github.com/justo-rivera/dibujio-client
Ps. Be sure to use a turn server besides a stun one, that was a big headache to get it working on mobile data
In WebRTC SamplesSimple-peer – Simple WebRTC video, voice, and data channels
1 points · Open discussionAdditionally, during the 3 years I've had experience with WebRTC, I've come across at least 2-3 browser bugs causing compatibility issues when connecting peers cross-browser.
This is just not something you run into with WebSockets.
I'd recommend simple-peer for anyone who does choose to use WebRTC. The maintainers are usually able to smooth these issues out in a reasonable timeframe. <3
https://github.com/feross/simple-peer
In WebTransport APIThe issue with webrtc is once you step out of the side-project domain, you have to confront the endless implementation differences between browsers, whether it's undocumented SDP behavior, different codecs, non-conformant behavior for low level calls, etc.
We've built a push-to-talk walkie talkie system called Squawk[0] which holds long lived webrtc connections in the background throughout the day. We use simplepeer[1] as the base to help bootstrap some of the browser shimming, but it's not perfect. So ultimately we've had to build all sorts of checks into our protocols like an audio keepalive where we send periodic frames (20ms) of silence down the media channel, and verify that we received some additional header bytes on the remote end, because otherwise webrtc would let the connections rot and you wouldn't know until you needed them wh
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ich in a push-to-talk situation is too late.
[0] https://www.squawk.to
[1] https://github.com/feross/simple-peer
Sure thing.
The video and voice chat is powered by WebRTC. The getUserMedia API allows a browser to access the webcam and microphone of the device. I used my own simple-peer (https://github.com/feross/simple-peer) library to make WebRTC a bit easier to work with.
The server is Node.js. I'm using Next.js for the first time on this project. I usually use a custom Express server for my projects. I'm a fan of several of Next.js's decisions -- it feels really nice to use, if a bit limiting sometimes.
I use the 'ws' package (https://github.com/websockets/ws) to implement a WebSocket server which is used to help the peers get connected over WebRTC. Once peers are connected, all video and video is transferred directly in a peer-to-peer fashion.
Except sometimes the connection can't be established, so to improve reliability of WebRTC you need to s
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et up a TURN relay server for those situations. I used coturn (https://github.com/coturn/coturn) for that.
Lastly, I used Chakra UI (https://chakra-ui.com/) as my React component library.
Really happy with how the easy the app has been to build.
The most difficult part was getting it to work on Safari for iOS. I spent about 50% of the effort working around various bugs in the Safari media stack. https://twitter.com/feross/status/1263544033135038464
Hope this was informative!