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Listening on Websocket to Enable Connections With Waku v2 Browser Peers

TODO (2023-05-24): Deprecate or fix

Currently, nim-waku only supports TCP transport. This means it is not possible to directly connect from a browser using js-waku to a nim-waku based node such as wakunode2.

To remediate to this, utilities such as websockify can be used. This tutorial explains how one can setup websockify alongside wakunode2 to accept connections from peer browsers.

Note that popular browsers only accept secure websocket connections (wss) in a secure page (https), hence we will also cover the creation of SSL certificates.

Creating certificate using cerbot

Feel free to skip this step if you already own SSL certificate for your domain.

To do so, simply follow the instructions at https://certbot.eff.org/.

Note that you do not need to have a web server (e.g. apache, nginx) running to setup wakunode2 with websockify.

Setting up websockify

You can install Websockify via your preferred package manager or using Python.

To start websockify, use the following command:

sudo websockify \
--cert /etc/letsencrypt/live/<your.domain>/fullchain.pem \
--key /etc/letsencrypt/live/<your.domain>/privkey.pem 0.0.0.0:443 \
127.0.0.1:<tcp_port>

With:

  • your.domain being your domain name (.e.g www.example.org).
  • tcp_port being the port on which wakunode2 is listening, by default 60000.

Notes:

  • This assumes you used certbot to generate certificate, /etc/letsencrypt/live is where certbot store certificates, if you have your own certificates, changes the path and be sure to pass the full certificate chain including the CA certificate to the --cert` argument.
  • sudo is needed because websockify listens on port 443; You can avoid using sudo by using a custom port, just be sure it is open to the internet by checking your firewall.

Getting your wakunode2's multiaddr

Start wakunode2 as you usually do, be sure to take in account the listening port to reflect it in the websockify command line.

wakunode2 prints the multiaddr it is listening too at the start of the logs:

INF 2021-06-23 10:37:25.274+10:00 Listening on topics="wakunode" tid=2271871 file=wakunode2.nim:170 full=/ip4/1.2.3.4/tcp/60000/p2p/16Uiu2HAmPRmVHjZSP3U1T9ez4EQBBUsji5RyvAyDGVNgTQajtEQJ

To get the websocket multiaddr, simply change the port and insert wss after said port:

/ip4/1.2.3.4/tcp/443/wss/p2p/16Uiu2HAmPRmVHjZSP3U1T9ez4EQBBUsji5RyvAyDGVNgTQajtEQJ

You can also use your domain name instead of ip address:

/dns4/your.domain/tcp/443/wss/p2p/16Uiu2HAmPRmVHjZSP3U1T9ez4EQBBUsji5RyvAyDGVNgTQajtEQJ