Unable to connect two browser tabs with a stand alone js-ipfs node

[negamaxi]

• Version: 0.49.0

• Platform: Windows, Linux

• Subsystem: browser environment (Firefox, Chrome)

Severity: High

Description:

I've used js-ipfs instance with a default config...

const ipfsNode = await ipfs.create();

...inside my web app and tried to connect two different browser tabs via pubsub. I've waited for hours, but there was no connection. ipfs.swarm.peers() was called every 10s, the result was always the same:

ipfs.pubsub.peers(topic) also was called every 10s and there was no peers at all.

I've looked through the web and found this config that make it work - my tabs start to see each other and discovered swarm peers list regularly changes:

  Addresses: {
    Swarm: [
      "/dns4/p2p.3box.io/tcp/9091/wss/p2p-webrtc-star/",
    ],
  }

Expected behaviour: js-ipfs discovers other peers out of the box without manual configuration, like go-ipfs do.

[achingbrain]

It's not very straightforward - there are some public webrtc servers but they tend to be under high load or unavailable so aren't really suitable for out-of-the-box use, more general tinkering, plus as a transport webrtc is quite heavyweight so you wouldn't want to (for example) connect to multiple signalling servers at a time.

go-ipfs has a much easier time of it (as does js-ipfs under node) as it can do things like open tcp connections whereas code running in the browser cannot.

There are a bunch of issues linked to from libp2p/js-libp2p#703 that will help this situation.

[negamaxi]

@achingbrain Thank you for response. So it's a matter of time when in-browser peers start to see each other out-of-the-box? If so, any ideas how long it will take?

[vasco-santos]

@negamaxi we aim to make that experience more out-of-the-box with the rendezvous protocol, followed by a large overhaul for the JS implementation of the DHT. You can follow libp2p/js-libp2p#703 to track the progress. We are targeting the rendezvous protocol for the next libp2p release libp2p@0.30. It should be a big step towards this out-of-the-box discovery by having peers registered under a rendezvous namespace. The DHT work should start after that release, once we have the new spec for it.

[negamaxi]

@vasco-santos nice to see there is a work in progress to make this happen. Thank you for pointing this out.