browser-blobs

iroh blobs browser demo

This example runs iroh-blobs in the browser, compiled to web assembly. For now, only the in-memory store works in the browser, so there is no persistence.

The demo implements a very simple blobs app where endpoints provide some text string as a blob, and others can download it. We have a shared library, a module that exposes this as a WASM module to web browsers, and a command line interface.

Run the browser version:

To build and run it yourself, follow these steps:

$ cargo install wasm-bindgen-cli
$ rustup target install wasm32-unknown-unknown
$ npm install
$ npm run build
$ npm run serve

Then, open http://localhost:8080. The app will print instructions on how to connect and accept connections.

To build in release mode and apply optimizations to reduce the wasm size, run npm run build:release instead.

Run the CLI version:

To provide a blob:

cargo run --features cli -- provide "some text to share"

To download from a ticket:

cargo run --features cli -- download <TICKET>

Navigate the code

This folder contains a single Rust crate that can be compiled to both webassembly for the browser and to a commad line.

• The shared code between WASM and CLI lives in src/node.rs.
• A WASM-only wrapper around the BlobNode defined there lives in src/wasm.rs. It mostly is concerned with converting types to browser-supported equivalents.
• The CLI binary is src/bin/cli.rs
• The web app (simple vanilla JS) lives in [public].

Running npm run build first compiles the crate to WASM, then creates the JavaScript browser bindings with wasm-bindgen, and puts the result into public/wasm, from where the wasm is imported in the main.js.