Gunrack

Motivation

Repository containing the works on GUN development.

Gun is a decentralized protocol for syncing data. Data is stored in a graph database by peers called "nodes", making it capable of storing SQL-like tables, JSON-like documents, and even for files and livestreaming.

Resources

Field Guide

The Two Views of GUN

Client
- Connecting to a GUN app and interacting with the chat (for example)
- No extra configuration is needed
Host (A Node)
- Hosting a node that syncs with the network specified, allowing private uses to connect to your node.
- This is where start_node.ts comes into play

Example

Just like video games, there's a different set of software needed to host your own server where people can join you through your public IP but, you can connect to servers as a client without any extra setup.

Initialization

In order to get up and running with GUN, you will need to install a few prerequisites.

Requirements:

Git
NodeJS
npm
TypeScript

Steps:

Clone the repository.

git@github.com:longtailfinancial/gunrack.git

Install the required dependencies.

npm install

Hosting a Node

In order to host a GUN Node, you will ofcourse need an internet connection / system to communicate with other computers on the network.

Hosting a node can be done on a variety of devices, examples include

Laptops
Raspberry Pi's (implied from laptops)
Remote Linode Servers
Phones can connect / interact but we haven't seen a use case for it to act as a Node.

Connecting to a Node

To connect to a Node, they need to be running a Gun server using http and with a port open. A Node script has been provided for this as dist/start_node.js.

The connecting client does not need this setup, and simply needs to have the server's url + '/gun' provided in the Gun constructor of their NodeJS code/Webpage's javascript. Example here:

Studying the examples

The Gun package comes pre-installed with a handful of examples. From the root of the repo, go to:

node_modules/gun/examples

The examples ( mostly in.html ) will work on their own without prior setup as JavaScript code is already embedded in them using < script > tags. Gun will create a local storage to save data generated from these examples.

Credit

Forked from JohannSuarez/gunrack

longtailfinancial / gunrack