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A comment on Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes. Parent comment

Re:Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes by feross on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @05:13PM (#23408831)
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 set 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!

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes by teah10 on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @06:37PM (#23409769)
This is a really nice writeup. Thank you for this. I am looking into learning more about this space and debating between a voice service like Agora / Tokbox vs rolling my own to learn. I would love to see a technical blog post on your stack!
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes by mkl on Thursday June 04, 2020 @06:54AM (#23414958)
Is this all running on one server? What resources does it take, for how many users?

What percentage of users need the TURN server?

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes by putsjoe on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @05:36PM (#23409097)
That's great thanks, really informative. May I ask where your hosting this all?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes by feross on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @06:27PM (#23409658)
I'm a huge fan of Linode. I've been a customer for nearly 10 years. I wrote an review a long time ago here: https://feross.org/linode-vps-hosting-review/
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes by mettamage on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @05:56PM (#23409329)
How do you do stun, turn and signalling?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Show HN: Virus Cafe – Make a friend in 2 minutes by feross on Wednesday June 03, 2020 @06:27PM (#23409653)
I set up a TURN server using coturn. I deploy it on port 443, which seems to be allowed by the most networks. Signaling uses a custom WebSocket server I'm running.
[ Parent | on HN ]