Magic Wormhole Mailbox Server

This repository holds the code for the main server that Magic-Wormhole clients connect to. The server performs store-and-forward delivery for small key-exchange and control messages. Bulk data is sent over a direct TCP connection, or through a transit-relay.

Clients connect with WebSockets, for low-latency delivery in the happy case where both clients are attached at the same time. Message are stored to enable non-simultaneous clients to make forward progress. The server uses a small SQLite database for persistence (and clients will reconnect automatically, allowing the server to be rebooted without losing state). An optional "usage DB" tracks historical activity for status monitoring and operational maintenance.

Installation

pip install magic-wormhole-mailbox-server

You either want to do this into a "user" environment (putting the twist and twistd executables in ~/.local/bin/) like this:

pip install --user magic-wormhole-mailbox-server

or put it into a virtualenv, to avoid modifying the system python's libraries, like this:

virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install magic-wormhole-mailbox-server

You probably don't want to use sudo when you run pip, since the dependencies that get installed may conflict with other python programs on your computer. pipsi is usually a good way to install into isolated environments, but unfortunately it doesn't work for magic-wormhole-mailbox-server, because we don't have a dedicated command to start the server (twist, described below, comes from the twisted package, and pipsi doesn't expose executables from dependencies).

For the installation from source, clone this repo, cd into the folder, create and activate a virtualenv, and run pip install ..

Running A Server

Note that the standard Magic-Wormhole command-line tool is preconfigured to use a mailbox server hosted by the project, so running your own server is only necessary for custom applications that use magic-wormhole as a library.

The mailbox server is deployed as a twist/twistd plugin. Running a basic server looks like this:

twist wormhole-mailbox --usage-db=usage.sqlite

Use twist wormhole-mailbox --help for more details.

If you use the default --port=tcp:4000, on a machine named example.com, then clients can reach your server with the following option:

wormhole --relay-url=ws://example.com:4000/v1 send FILENAME

Using Docker

Dockerfile content:

FROM python:3.11
RUN pip install magic-wormhole-mailbox-server
CMD [ "twist", "wormhole-mailbox","--usage-db=usage.sqlite" ]

Note: This will be running as root, you should adjust it to be in user space for production.

Build and run:

docker build -t magicwormhole Dockerfile
docker run -p 4000:4000 -d magicwormhole

Connect:

wormhole --relay-url=ws://localhost:4000/v1 send FILENAME

License, Compatibility

This library is released under the MIT license, see LICENSE for details.

This library is compatible with python3 (3.9 and higher).