FEfeross·Feb 27, 2017
I'm the author of WebTorrent, and let me tell you that getting WebRTC to run server-side is not fun.
The two best implementations on npm are `wrtc`: https://www.npmjs.com/package/wrtc and `electron-webrtc`: https://www.npmjs.com/package/electron-webrtc
Both have serious shortcomings. `wrtc` uses the Google webrtc.org library which is overly complex since it includes lots of code for dealing with complex video/audio codec stuff that isn't needed to open a simple data channel. And if you're unlucky enough to be on a platform that they haven't made a prebuilt binary for, then you have to wait an hour for a bunch of Chrome-specific build tools to download and compile the library locally. Not fun to wait an hour after typing 'npm install'.
The other library, `electron-webrtc` literally launches a hidden instance of Electron and communicates wi
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th it over IPC from Node.js, which means it runs everywhere that Electron does (without waiting for anything to compile!), but it's a pretty heavy-handed approach. Launching a whole Chromium instance when you need a socket is, like, not ideal.
Another idea: how about implementing just the parts needed for Data Channel in JavaScript? A former Mozilla engineer, now Google engineer, actually tried this but gave up before finishing. His code is here: https://github.com/nickdesaulniers/node-rtc-peer-connection It's also not trivial since it requires a DTLS (TLS over UDP) implementation, and it's not exactly trivial to write one of those in JS. There is a chance that Node.js could expose the DTLS implementation from OpenSSL, since that's already part of Node. Then we could probably achieve a "pure JS" (no npm compile step) implementation of Data Channel. But there's still quite a bit more code needed to finish off this implementation. Discussion here: https://github.com/nodejs/node/issues/2398
I'm grateful to all the awesome folks that worked on these implementations, and this isn't meant to snub any of them. WebRTC is hard!
We actually use `electron-webrtc` in `webtorrent-hybrid`, a CLI version of WebTorrent that can talk to "web peers" in browsers (https://github.com/feross/webtorrent-hybrid). Fortunately, most users can just install WebTorrent Desktop (https://webtorrent.io/desktop/) which works nicely.
But this all goes to show just how overly complex WebRTC is, and why we really do need something like this post suggests, a low-level UDP API for the web.