liamcottle/reticulum-webchat

Reticulum WebChat

What is Reticulum WebChat?

A simple mesh network communications app powered by the Reticulum Network Stack.

What does it do?

It can send and receive messages, files and audio calls with peers;
- Over your local network through Ethernet and WiFi, completely automatically.
- Over the internet by connecting through a server hosted by yourself or the community.
- Over low-powered, license-free, ISM band LoRa Radio, with an RNode.
- ...and via any other interface supported by the Reticulum Network Stack.
It can communicate with any other existing LXMF client.
It can download files and browse micron pages (decentralised websites) hosted on Nomad Network nodes.

Features

Supports sending and receiving messages between Reticulum WebChat, Sideband and Nomadnet.
Supports receiving and saving images and attachments sent from Sideband.
Supports sending images and file attachments.
Supports saving inbound and outbound messages to a local database.
Supports sending an announce to the network.
Supports setting a custom display name to send in your announce.
Supports viewing and searching peers discovered from announces.

Beta Features

Support for Audio Calls to other Reticulum WebChat users.
- Audio is encoded with codec2 to support low bandwidth links.
- Using a microphone requires using the web ui over localhost or https, due to AudioWorklet secure context.
- I have tested two-way audio calls over LoRa with a single hop. It works well when a reasonable bitrate is configured on the RNode.
Support for browsing pages, and downloading files hosted on Nomad Network Nodes.

NOTE: micron format parsing is still in development, some pages may not render or work correctly at all.

Download

You can download the latest version for Windows and Mac from the releases page.

Alternatively, you can download the source and run it manually from a command line.

See the "How to use it?" section below on how to do this.

Getting Started

Once you've downloaded, installed and launched Reticulum WebChat, there's a few things you need to do in order to start communicating with other people on the network.

Create an Identity
Configure your Display Name
Send an Announce
Discover Peers and start sending messages
Configuring additional Network Interfaces

Create an Identity

On the Reticulum Network, anyone can have any number of Identities. You may opt to use your real name, or you may decide to be completely anonymous. The choice is yours.

A Reticulum Identity is a public/private key-pair. You control the private key used to generate destination addresses, encrypt content and prove receipt of data with unforgeable delivery acknowledgements.

Your public key is shared with the network when you send an announce, and allows others on the network to automatically discover a route to a destination you control.

At this time, Reticulum WebChat generates a new Identity the first time you launch it. A future update will allow you to create and manage multiple identities.

For now, if you want to change, or reset your identity, you can access the identity file at ~/.reticulum-webchat/identity.

Configure your Display Name

The next thing you should do, is set a display name. Your display name is what everyone else on the network will see when looking for someone to communicate with from the Peers list.

You can do this in the My Identity section in the bottom left corner. Enter a new display name, and then press Save.

Send an Announce

When using the Reticulum Network, in order to be contactable, you need to send an Announce. You can send an announce as often, or as infrequently as you like.

Sending an announce allows other peers on the network to discover the next-hop across the network their packets should take to arrive at a destination that your identity controls.

If you never send an announce, you will be invisible and no one will ever be able to send anything to you.

When you move across the network, and change entrypoints, such as moving from your home WiFi network, to plugging in to an Ethernet port in a local library or even climbing a mountain and using an RNode over LoRa radio, other peers on the network will only know the previous path to your destinations.

To allow them to discover the new path their packets should take to reach you, you should send an announce.

Discover Peers and start sending messages

In the Reticulum Network, you can control an unlimited number of destination addresses. One of these can be an LXMF delivery address.

Your Reticulum Identity allows you to have an LXMF address. Think of an LXMF address as your very own, secure, end-to-end encrypted, unspoofable, email address routed over a mesh network.

When someone else on the network announces themselves (more specifically, their LXMF address), they will show up in the Peers tab.

You can click on any of these discovered peers to open a messaging interface. From here, you can send text messages, files and inline images. If they respond, their messages will show up there too.

As well as being able to announce your LXMF address and discover others, Reticulum WebChat can also discover Nomad Network nodes hosted by other users. From the Nodes tab, you are free to explore pages and download files they may be publicly sharing on the network.

A future update is planned to allow you to host your own Node and share pages and files with other peers on the network. For now, you could use the official Nomad Network client to do this.

Remember, in order to connect with other peers or nodes, they must announce on the network. So don't forget to announce if you want to be discovered!

Configuring additional Network Interfaces

TODO: this section is yet to be written. For now, you can check out the official documentation for configuring interfaces in the Reticulum config file. This file is located at ~/.reticulum/config

How does it work?

A python script (web.py) runs a Reticulum instance and a WebSocket server.
The web page sends and receives LXMF packets encoded in json via the WebSocket.
Web Browser -> WebSocket -> Python Reticulum -> (configured interfaces) -> (destination)
LXMF messages sent and received are saved to a local SQLite database.

How to use it?

If you don't want to, or can't download a standalone application, you will need to install Python 3, clone the source code from this repo, install dependencies and then run web.py.

git clone https://github.com/liamcottle/reticulum-webchat
cd reticulum-webchat
pip install -r requirements.txt
python web.py

NOTE: You should now be able to access the web interface at http://localhost:8000

For a full list of command line options, you can run;

python web.py --help

usage: web.py [-h] [--host [HOST]] [--port [PORT]] [--headless] [--identity-file IDENTITY_FILE] [--identity-base64 IDENTITY_BASE64] [--generate-identity-file GENERATE_IDENTITY_FILE] [--generate-identity-base64]
              [--reticulum-config-dir RETICULUM_CONFIG_DIR] [--storage-dir STORAGE_DIR]

ReticulumWebChat

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --host [HOST]         The address the web server should listen on.
  --port [PORT]         The port the web server should listen on.
  --headless            Web browser will not automatically launch when this flag is passed.
  --identity-file IDENTITY_FILE
                        Path to a Reticulum Identity file to use as your LXMF address.
  --identity-base64 IDENTITY_BASE64
                        A base64 encoded Reticulum Identity to use as your LXMF address.
  --generate-identity-file GENERATE_IDENTITY_FILE
                        Generates and saves a new Reticulum Identity to the provided file path and then exits.
  --generate-identity-base64
                        Outputs a randomly generated Reticulum Identity as base64 and then exits.
  --reticulum-config-dir RETICULUM_CONFIG_DIR
                        Path to a Reticulum config directory for the RNS stack to use (e.g: ~/.reticulum)
  --storage-dir STORAGE_DIR
                        Path to a directory for storing databases and config files (default: ./storage)

Using an existing Reticulum Identity

The first time you run this application, a new Reticulum identity is generated and saved to storage/identity.

If you want to use an existing identity;

You can overwrite storage/identity with another identity file.
Or, you can pass in a custom identity file path as a command line argument.

To use a custom identity file, provide the --identity-file argument followed by the path to your custom identity file.

python web.py --identity-file ./custom_identity_file

If you would like to generate a new identity, you can use the rnid utility provided by Reticulum.

rnid --generate ./new_identity_file

If you don't have access to the rnid command, you can use the following:

python web.py --generate-identity-file ./new_identity_file

Alternatively, you can provide a base64 encoded private key, like so;

python web.py --identity-base64 "GCN6mMhVemdNIK/fw97C1zvU17qjQPFTXRBotVckeGmoOwQIF8VOjXwNNem3CUOJZCQQpJuc/4U94VSsC39Phw=="

NOTE: this is a randomly generated identity for example purposes. Do not use it, it has been leaked!

Build Electron Application

Reticulum WebChat can be run from source via a command line, as explained above, or as a standalone application.

To run as a standalone application, we need to compile the python script and dependencies to an executable with cxfreeze and then build an Electron app which includes a bundled browser that can interact with the compiled python executable.

This allows for the entire application to be run by double clicking a single file without the need for a user to manually install python, nor run any commands in a command line application.

To build a .exe when running on Windows or a .dmg when running on a Mac, run the following;

pip install -r requirements.txt
npm install
npm run dist

Note: cxfreeze only supports building an executable for the current platform. You will need a Mac to build for Mac, and a Windows PC to build for Windows.

Once completed, you should have a .exe or a .dmg in the dist folder.

TODO

License

MIT

liamcottle / reticulum-webchat